Welcome to
The Sarah & Hajar Series
SACRED PRACTICE & POSSIBILITY AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF JUDAISM AND ISLAM
We’re delighted to welcome you into our virtual immersion at the heart of Jewish and Muslim devotion. Our conversations feature spiritual leaders, artists, activists, scholars & more. While our series initially released during the shared sacred days of Passover and Ramadan, feel welcome to listen anytime!
We’d love to know your experience of listening. Feel welcome to share what most moves you here.
The Sarah & Hajar Series convener Taya Mâ Shere offers context for the series and her journey of creating in the immense blessing field of Pir Dr. Ibrahim Baba Farajajé, whose devotion to organic multi-religiosity, and whose sacred script-flip of the Abrahamic faiths to the Sarah and Hajaric faiths continues to open portals of possibility.
May this journey spark connection and understanding, uplift the most exquisite dreaming of our traditions, and deeply root practices of counter-oppressive multi-religious devotion…
Sukina Noor
…is an internationally renowned poet, playwright, workshop facilitator and educator. Born in the UK to Jamaican parents, Sukina was raised in a Rastafari-inspired environment and embraced Islam almost 20 years ago - since that time she has played an intrinsic role within the British Muslim creative community. Sukina facilitates in-person and online writing workshops toward awakening the voice of the heart. Her new book of poetry is Love and Longing: Yearning for the Face of God. Sukina is also a muqedma, a spiritual guide and teacher in the Tijani Sufi lineage.
Hadar Cohen
…is an Arab Jewish scholar, mystic and artist. She teaches direct experience of God and Jewish mysticism at her spiritual skill building school Malchut. She is a 10th-generation Jerusalemite with lineage roots also in Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Hadar weaves the spiritual with the political through performance art, writing, music and ritual. She was the first fellow at Abrahamic House, a multifaith social change incubator, was recently featured on Season 3 of “Ramy: One Cup of Tea” (Hulu) and has her own column at The New Arab.
Sheikh Ghassan Manasra
… is international director of the Abrahamic Reunion Project, and a globally recognized interreligious dialogue facilitator, Fulbright Scholar, and Lecturer from Nazareth. Sheikh Ghassan serves, and has served, on the boards of numerous international peacemaking organizations, including The Middle East Civic Forum, Sulha Peace Project, Anwar Il-Salaam / Lights of Peace Center, and the World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace. He holds regular peace vigils with the Abrahamic Reunion Project and offers weekly zikr through Rising Tide International. Sheikh Ghassan belongs to a renowned Sufi family and is the head of the Tariqat As Salaam Qadiri Sufi Order.
Miriam Peretz
…is an internationally celebrated dancer devoted to creating transformational experiences for her students and audiences worldwide. Miriam’s signature style draws heavily on Central Asian dance, devotional Sufi whirling, and sacred dance rituals from around the world. Her movement quality and aesthetics also incorporate her years of martial arts training, contemporary dance, Flamenco, and many other world dance forms. In all of her online and in-person offerings, including Nava Dance, Integral Dance, Turning Toward the Heart and her intensives around the world, Miriam weaves movement and ritual together to create communal experiences for healing and empowered embodiment.
Neil Douglas-Klotz
… is a world-renowned scholar in religious studies, spirituality and psychology. A frequent speaker and workshop leader, his many books include The Sufi Book of Life: 99 Pathways of the Heart for the Modern Dervish, A Little Book of Sufi Stories, Desert Wisdom: A Nomad’s Guide to Life’s Big Questions, Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus, The Tent of Abraham (co-authored), Prayers of the Cosmos, The Hidden Gospel and and the Spirituality of Creation. Neil cofounded the Edinburgh International Festival of Middle Eastern Spirituality and Peace. Under his Sufi name, Saadi Shakur Chishti, he offers spiritual retreats combining his work with Native Middle Eastern spirituality with the lineage of Chishti Sufism and serves on the advisory board of the International Association of Sufism.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
… is an author, curator of anti-colonial archives, film essayist, and theorist of photography. She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is of Algerian and Palestinian descent and identifies as a Muslim Jew, which she powerfully unpacks in her article Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues. Azoulay recently completed a children story, Gold Threads, based on an early 20th century strike led by jewelers and gold spinners, acting also as guardians of the Muslim and Jewish world in Fes, Morocco. Ariella Aïsha’s newest book project is Algerian Letters - The Jewelers of the Ummah (Verso 2024), and its companion film is the world like a jewel in the hand.
MoYah
aka Mohammed Yahya, is a rapper and an award-winning interfaith arts programmer curating projects for refugees and asylum seekers. Born in Mozambique during a 16-year war, MoYah was forced to flee his country as a political refugee, and he uses his experience of war and displacement to encourage artistic activism, disintegrate stereotypes & encourage community cohesion between different faiths in the UK and beyond. MoYah has performed extensively across Europe, United States, South America and the African continent, sharing stages with artists including Nas, Africa Bambaataa, Yuna, Guru & Talib Kweli. He founded the first Muslim/ Jewish Hip Hop Duo in the UK, ‘ Lines of Faith’, delivering performances and workshops to challenge prejudice, and to build meaningful bonds between communities. He was named Hip Hop Ambassador of May Project Gardens, and is Head of Social Impact of Acorda Music.
Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson
… is a rabbi, meditation teacher, and author of books on meditation, religion, and spirituality including God In Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness and Spiritual Practice and Everything is God: The Radical Path of Non-Dual Judaism. He is journalist at New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, and other publications and has written over 1400 articles on the Supreme Court, religion, LGBTQ issues, climate change, and more. Jay is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and a visiting fellow at the Center for LGBTQ Studies in Religion. Jay holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. His tenth book, The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth, published by Oxford University Press, won the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for scholarship.
Dr. Leyla Ozgur Alhassen
…is a Qur’anic studies scholar and the author of Qur’anic Stories: God, Revelation and the Audience (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and How the Qur’ān Works: Reading Sacred Narrative (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Her scholarship revolves around Qur’anic stories, style and interpretation in literature, performance, and art, across historical periods, languages, and disciplinary boundaries. Dr. Ozgur Alhassen is working on a book on hierarchies of beings in the Qur’an, and is the author of a number of articles. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures.
Arielle Tonkin
… (they/she) is an artist, Spiritual Director, and scholar of art and Judaics. As a teaching artist, Arielle facilitates classes and workshops at universities, museums, and organizations, and their artwork, rooted in painting, fibers and social practice, centers on ritual and healing. Recent exhibition highlights include: A Fence Around the Torah: Safety and Unsafety in Jewish Life at the Jewish Museum of Maryland and Queering Jewish Diasporas at the Omni Commons, Oakland, CA. As a Spiritual Director, Arielle facilitates life cycle ritual and Jewish and interfaith learning. A lay-hazzan and current SVARA Fellow in the Talmud Teaching Kollel, Arielle’s arts and culture organizing centers around dismantling systems of oppression; Muslim-Jewish cross-textual arts exchange; and Mizrahi cultural flourishing in the diaspora.
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
… is one of the first women to become a rabbi in Jewish history. She is a pathfinding Jewish feminist, human rights activist, writer, visual artist, ceremonialist, community educator and master storyteller. Lynn has been a congregational rabbi since the fall of 1973 and Lynn engages in multifaith, intergenerational and multicultural organizing in solidarity with racial, indigenous, gender justice and Palestinian liberation struggles. Lynn sits on the Rabbinic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and is board chair of Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity. Rabbi Lynn is the author of several books, including Peace Primer II, She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of Renewed Judaism, World Beyond Borders Passover Haggadah and Trail Guide to the Torah of Nonviolence. Rabbi Lynn is a Shomeret Shalom, a practitioner of the Torah of nonviolence.
Ani Zonneveld
…is a writer, singer/songwriter, speaker, human rights defender, and founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV), a global, grassroots faith-based human rights organization. Founded in 2007 in Los Angeles, MPV advocates for egalitarian expressions of Islam, for women’s rights, LGBTQI rights, freedom of expression, and freedom of and from religion or belief. MPV also promotes these values at the United Nations by challenging human rights abuses in the name of Islam, and by offering an inclusive understanding based on universal human rights and justice. In October of 2017 in Tunisia, Ani founded Alliance of Inclusive Muslims, a global umbrella organization spanning six continents and registered as a human rights association in Geneva and Uganda. Born and raised Muslim from Malaysia and based out of Los Angeles, she spearheads the progressive Muslim movement both internationally and in the U.S.
Sheikh Dr. Ibrahim Baba Farajajé
…may his secret be sanctified and his memory be a blessing, is a scholartivist, tikkunolamologist, and public intellectual of multi-religiosity. Ibrahim Baba has been a teacher in the Chishty lineage, guide of the Ateshi-ashk Chishti community, a spiritual leader in Jewish & multireligious community & co-founded Makam Shekhina. Ibrahim Baba served as Provost at Starr King School for the Ministry, where he taught for over two decades, and as faculty at Howard University School of Divinity.
His sacred teachings on multireligiosity, counter-oppressive devotion, and much more powerfully and palpably live on through our work in this series and in so many ways- feel him pulsing here, and welcome him & listen for his blessing beaming wherever you most need it.
Taya Mâ Shere
…plays passionately in realms of transformative ritual, embodied vocalization, and ancestral healing. She hosts the acclaimed Jewish Ancestral Healing podcast, is a professor of Organic Multireligious Ritual at Starr King School for the Ministry, and is co-founder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. Taya Mâ offers online courses including Jewish Ancestral Healing, Embodied Presence, Practice Makes Imperfect, and Pleasure as Prayer. She is co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership, creator of the Liberate Your Seder Haggadeck, and co-creator of The Omer Oracle. Her Hebrew Goddess chant albums have been heralded as “cutting-edge mystic medicine music.” Her recent album, Makam Shekhina, is pulsing Hebrew-Arabic prayer in cahoots with her beloved collaborator Shaykh Ibrahim Baba z’’l, and their spiritual community.
Izza Genini
…known as “The Godmother of Moroccan Film” is a director, founder of the production company Ohra, and active campaigner for the cinema of Morocco and North Africa. Izza was born in 1942 in Casablanca, grew up in France and returned to Morocco an adult. Her films — including Return to Oulad Moumen and Trances, and her film series Morocco Body and Soul and Musical Morocco — weave themes including Moroccan Jewish heritage, diasporic identities, women’s traditions and sacred sound. Izza’s films explore musical tradition and ceremony of Amazigh, al-Andalus, Cheikate, Gnawa, Sephardic Jews and more. Her films A Song for Shabbat, Nuba of Light and Gold and Embroidered Canticles and more speak to the intersections of Moroccan Jewish and Muslim experience and expression. Izza has inspired generations of artists and filmmakers and is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Pomegranate award from the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival for excellence and achievement.
The Sarah & Hajar Series is created in collaboration with Jewish Ancestral Healing podcast and the Center for Multi-Religious Studies at Starr King School for the Ministry, and is made possible by the generous support of Rise Up Initiative: Nurturing the Soul of Jewish Justice, by Ruach haMidbar: Spirit of the Desert, and by listeners like you!
We give great thanks for the sacred copperwork of Shahna Lax - her Shema / Shehada plate is featured in our cover image - and to Rabbi Tirzah Firestone for the gift of this exquisite piece. Much appreciation to composer Hamed Habibpour for the sweet santor instrumental that weaves our sonic outro for each episode, and to Sheikh Issa Baba for his soaring vocals which accompany Sheikh Ibrahim Baba’s invocation for each episode, excepted from the Makam Shekhina album.
Illumination at the Threshold by Shahna Lax, weaving Arabic from the Hadith: Al Janatu tahta akdam il uma'at, “Paradise/the garden lies under the feet of the mothers", with Hebrew from Psalms: Or Zaruah / ‘Light is Planted.’