One conversation. One sacrifice. A journey of becoming.

I have always been curious about people.

I like knowing why we do the things we do. Why we think the way we think. Why some patterns follow us for generations while others disappear. I am interested in what happens inside a person, but also in what happens around them: families, communities, cultures, institutions and the ideas we inherit without always realising that we have inherited them.

I love research for much the same reason. I like finding the question that has not quite been answered, noticing the gap that everyone seems to have stepped over, and then becoming slightly too interested in figuring out what is sitting there.

Psychology, the social sciences and the humanities have given me a way of doing that. I have spent years reading, studying and trying to understand people, not as abstract subjects, but as human beings shaped by relationships, experiences, beliefs and the communities in which they live.

My interest in parenting began rather unexpectedly.

I was pregnant with my daughter, still working, and one warm summer evening my husband and I were sitting on our balcony talking about the baby who was on her way. I was excited! I was thinking about pregnancy, birth, tiny clothes and all the ordinary things that occupy the mind of someone expecting their first child.

Then he said, "We need to break the cycle."

I did not immediately understand what he meant.

He was talking about the parts of our own childhoods and the patterns of parenting we had experienced that we did not want to carry forward. There was no blame attached to it. Our parents had done what they knew how to do, as parents always do, within the circumstances and understanding they had at the time.

But we could make different choices.

Then he said something else that stayed with me: "We only get one chance to do this."

That was the moment I began to understand parenting differently.

Until then, I had thought about having a child. I had not yet really thought about being responsible for the kind of human being I was helping to form.

Breaking the cycle eventually required a sacrifice of its own. I left my career to become a full-time mother, and our family moved to living on one income. It was not an easy decision, but I felt that if I was serious about understanding and changing the way I parented, I needed to be fully present for it.

So I started studying.

I read, I took parenting courses and I went back to university and completed my studies in psychology, followed by postgraduate study. I became increasingly interested not only in child development and behaviour, but in the parent who stands on the other side of the relationship.

At the same time, my interest in Islam was developing in its own direction.

I studied Islamic Studies within a secular university environment, which I found both intellectually stimulating and unexpectedly liberating. I also studied through a traditional Islamic institution, an experience that affected me in a very different way and became an important part of my own development.

The two experiences have continued to sit alongside one another in my thinking.

I am interested in what psychology can help us understand about human beings, and I am equally interested in what our Islamic tradition asks of us as human beings. I am particularly interested in the space where parenting, character, spiritual development and everyday life meet.

I should make one thing clear. I am not an Islamic scholar, and I do not issue fatwas or provide the kind of religious rulings that should come from qualified scholars. Where a question requires formal Islamic scholarship, that is where I would always direct someone. My work is different. I research, study, question, reflect and bring together ideas from Islamic thought and the social sciences in order to explore what they might mean for Muslim parents in everyday life.

My two main areas of research have become Islamic parenting and Islamic dietary practices.

My Master's research focused on Islamic dietary practices, and that work continues to interest me. Food is never only about food. It tells us something about faith, culture, family, identity, health, economics and the ways people negotiate religious principles in real life.

Parenting, however, has become the work I have chosen to devote myself to more fully.

The idea for this platform began in 2020.

We had recently moved away from the city where we had grown up and had lived all our lives. We were in a new city, trying to establish ourselves, and then COVID arrived and the world became very small. Like many people, I suddenly had considerably more time to think about what I was actually doing with my life.

I kept coming back to parenting.

I had already spent years studying it, reading about it and trying to understand it. I had taken courses and followed different approaches. I had also become increasingly aware of something that bothered me: so much parenting advice is directed towards changing the child.

Get the child to listen.

Get the child to behave.

Get the child to sleep.

Get the child to cooperate.

I kept wondering what would happen if we asked a different question.

What if we started with the parent?

That question eventually became the foundation of this work.

It has taken six years to get from that first idea to what you see here. There were earlier versions. Some worked and some did not. Some I abandoned because, quite frankly, I did not like what I was making. There has been a considerable amount of reading, research, questioning, rewriting and thinking in between.

I am still thinking.

I suspect I always will be.

This platform is therefore not the product of a single parenting philosophy that I discovered one afternoon and decided everyone else should follow. It has grown out of years of study, research, observation and trying to understand what it means to raise children while also being responsible for our own character, conduct and spiritual development.

I have made a lot of du'a that this work will be beneficial. That it will give parents something useful to think about when the house is quiet, something uncomfortable but worthwhile when it needs to be uncomfortable, and something practical enough to carry into everyday family life.

And because this is also an About page, I should probably admit a few things that have very little to do with my academic interests.

I love trees.

There is something about being around trees that settles me in a way very little else does. I love the outdoors, I love animals, and I have developed a particular appreciation for rain. I can quite happily sit with a cup of tea and watch rain fall onto leaves for an unreasonable amount of time.

I also love my cat dearly.

Possibly more than is entirely necessary.

Animals have always interested me because of their vulnerability and their dependence on us. For someone who spends a great deal of time trying to understand human behaviour, I sometimes find animals considerably easier to understand.

So that is probably enough about me.

I prefer to remain somewhat in the background. The work matters more to me than becoming the person attached to it.

What I hope you will find here is the result of all the things that have brought me to this point: a love of research, a fascination with human beings, a commitment to Islamic learning, years spent thinking about parenting, and a sincere hope that we can become more conscious of the people we are while we are raising the people who have been entrusted to us.

That is the work I have chosen to do.