The Holy Artifacts

"Prayer is not about rising above the world, but about descending into your heart, where the Divine has always been."

Prayer is one of the most sacred choreographies of remembrance, the daily opportunity for our souls to return to their Origin. Salah is not just prayer, but a “connection” where each position is a sacred key that unlocks a hidden door within the heart into divine intimacy. When we stand in salah, we rise as witnesses with our bodies, minds, and spirits aligned before the One who raised us from nothing.

But remembrance and prayer are not meant to be something that is reserved for mosques and prayer times. Our prayers are meant to be like a river, flowing through our prayer mats and into the valleys of our every day lives.

Allah is not just meant to be witnessed in the quiet hours of the morning or the stillness of night vigils, but in the in-betweens of faith and doubt, in the spaces we forget to look for Him.

I have been thinking for some time, how to widen my consciousness and open my eyes to the many blessings of Allah hidden in plain sight. How can my faith be something I carry both quietly and publicly? How can the symbols of Islam inspire to imbed me more naturally and artistically?

So when I had the opportunity to design a collection of clothing and a piece of art, I didn’t know that deep down it was answering a call, a hidden prayer inside of me to witness Allah everywhere. I knew I wanted each design to reflect an insight, something of my inner worlds into outer forms, something I could both remember and share.

The Holy Artifacts project gave me the chance to create in a way I didn’t I had a deep longing to attempt. It gave me an opportunity to speak not in words, but in images. It was a language I wasn’t as familiar in, but one that I have grown to love. The piece below called “Artifacts of Play” best emulates experimenting the interplay of words and experience. This modern take of an ancient Persian miniature drawing shows a mystic soaring through the air dunking “the truth” where others only measure it. Below him, the scholars sit in quiet devotion, their books heavy with letters that long to become light. They study the words that describe the sky, while the mystic flies through it. This piece mixes my life-long love of basketball with my spiritual path in a way that feels greater than the sum of its parts. It carries my longing to imbed the truths I read about in the setting of experience, to not just collect truths, but in a way to become them.

The world is going through something very deep in this moment and whether it’s being in circles of light and remembrance, surrounding yourself with reminders of faith feels essential. If faith inspired clothing speaks to you check out the website and if not, still take a look at the designs and the words that accompany each piece as a means of remembering the One who is both hidden and apparent in all words, and yet somehow completely beyond all language and human understanding. It’s always been such a wonderfully dizzying experience to remember that all that I know and can know is not even a single drop of the shoreless, infinite ocean of Divine knowing!

In prayers of light upon light,