I grew up with an Islam that seemed only about hellfire and damnation. The gardens of heaven did exist somewhere but were mainly reserved for the prophets and saints – certainly not for the average believer who was in a constant state of sin and being reminded about it daily. My parents shouted at me to do my daily prayers or I would go to hell. The imam at the mosque shouted that I had to obey my parents or I would go to hell. The imam’s wife shouted at me to cover my hair – or I would go to hell.

I tried to read the Qur’an in English when I felt old enough to understand some of the archaic early English translations, to find something beyond hellfire and damnation. But I didn’t get far as Abraham’s God continued to shout at me about the torment of hell.

And yet, despite it all, I retained a reverence for the Qur’an. I reasoned to myself that I didn’t understand what it was saying because the translators were flawed in their ability to express God’s word. This may seem an arrogant viewpoint for a teenager to hold but my heart felt that this must be so – as my God could not be so patriarchal, judgemental, and mean – otherwise why create the universe if it was just going to be a long, miserable wait to get to hell? I still felt guilty that I couldn’t relate to the Qur’an and hoped that ‘one day’ it would reveal itself to me when I was ready to understand.

That ‘one day’ arrived very unexpectedly in my late twenties when I attended my first Sufi retreat in the UK and met Shaikha Camille Helminski. Not your typical shaikha, especially if you come from a Pakistani background. She was white (intriguing), American (disconcerting), and didn’t wear a hijab (shocking). Neither did I – but my hypocritical, ingrained cultural conditioning seemed to expect it from her! As I sat in a roomful of people, struggling with all my conflicting feelings, Shaikha Camille very unassumedly lifted her carefully placed scarf from her shoulder and draped it casually over her head.

And then she recited a verse from the Qur’an.

I say recite, but this word does not quite capture what happened. My experience of Qur’anic recitation was of men shouting it through shoddy speakers with ridiculous reverb at the mosque, or men shouting it on the television on the growing number of Islamic cable channels, or rows of young boys and girls chanting it in monotone at the madrassa when I was young.

This recitation struck me like a vision, as clouds parting and light streaming into the room to bathe Shaikha Camille in radiance. Her melody was unlike anything I had experienced: sacred, angelic, and slightly Celtic, it perfectly came together in holy harmony. The verse was short – I think – I was a puddle of perplexity and ecstasy and I don’t remember what happened next. At some point the session ended and I retreated to sob where no one could hear me. This was not the Islam I thought I knew; was it therefore an abominable innovation? But if this was sinful, why did it feel so angelic and bright? My heart’s sudden expansion had highlighted the iron bars in my chest that I hadn’t even realised had been there my whole life, and it hurt.

The next morning shattered further illusions as Shaikha Camille recited more verses and gave their translations in English. I was left feeling like she was surely reading from a different book. And when she referred to God as ‘He/She’ my mind felt like it was going to explode: this was wrong (but why?); this was blasphemous (but how?); this was definitely not Islam (and yet…).

My inner turmoil left me unable to approach Shaikha Camille and speak to her directly, but I noted that the book that she was reading from was available in the retreat bookstore and I grabbed one of the few copies to dissect when I returned home. The Mevlevi Wird is a litany of prayers recited daily by Mevlevi students. Shaikha Camille compiled the current publication with English translation and transliteration of the Arabic so you can read it in either language.

I was amazed to find verses – that I thought I knew very well – translated in new and unexpectedly beautiful ways. The Throne verse in particular is one I had recited regularly in Arabic. I thought I had a cursory understanding of the English meaning but the Wird gave new depths to the familiar words. And the jarring quality of seeing ‘He/She’ instead of the traditional ‘He’ shook me. Intellectually I knew God was beyond gender, and yet a whole lifetime (and centuries before me) had shaped God into a male, patriarchal, stern father figure – not quite the old man in the cloud and yet not far off that image either. To see the gender-inclusive language was a physically shocking experience, and reading God as She opened me in new ways to the compassion and mercy that is promised at the start of nearly every surah of the Qur’an. The first time I recited the Throne verse in English, aloud after my prayers, using the feminine pronoun, left me sobbing for some time into my prayer rug.

And so I met the Qur’an.

Mevlana Rumi says: