Aliya Haeri

Bio & resources

When a female colleague from the London EnlightenNext center told me that she’d recently met a woman who felt like a spiritual soul sister, I was, needless to say, interested—I’m always interested in knowing about women who have committed their lives to Spirit. But when she said that this woman was not only an American Sufi teacher living in South Africa but had married her own teacher, Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri, becoming his third wife in a multiple marriage, I became completely intrigued. Remarkably, my colleague stressed the liberation and independence that this woman, Aliya Haeri, expressed in her being. It made me very curious not only about Haeri herself but about the path she is on.

At first, I wondered if she had returned to a traditional religious context as a refuge from our chaotic, globalizing world, as quite a few seem to be doing. But the more I learned about her life, the less that seemed to be the case. In the 1970s, Haeri was a well-known researcher of the paranormal. After realizing that this endeavor would not give her the deeper meaning and knowledge that she was seeking, she came upon Sufism. Sufism, which is the mystical path in Islam, met both her heart’s desire for depth and her mind’s craving for understanding. After converting to Sufism, Haeri pursued advanced studies in psychology—receiving her master’s degree in 1995 from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. An avid reader of the latest philosophical and cultural theories, including integral psychology, she has developed her own integration of the spiritual and psychological that focuses on soul development, which she teaches as director of the Academy of Self Knowledge in South Africa.

As I came to understand Haeri’s interest in the human psyche, her attraction to Sufism began to make even more sense. Sufism has very sophisticated and exquisitely precise teachings about the forces within the human psyche—the light and dark impulses—that make the human predicament so complex. And yet, as a traditional mystical path, it also unequivocally demands that Spirit come first, because no amount of psychological understanding will free the soul. “Islam” means to surrender—to God or to the ALL. And in following the Sufi path to God realization, Haeri discovered, and now embodies, the mystical paradox that surrender is liberation, and that profound submission actually results in true independence.

So it was with great pleasure that I spoke with Aliya Haeri about the path she has chosen—and about how her embrace of this beautiful tradition has met her very contemporary need for understanding and freedom.