Michael Sugich, Mostafa al-Badawi and Peter Sanders: a conversation in Cairo on the sages of Islam.

#sufism #baalawi #habaib #saints #habibahmad #alhaddad #hadramout
A unique conversation recorded in Cairo in December 2022 between three men who have kept company with some of the great living sages of Islam. All three were students of the legendary Ba 'Alawi master Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad. Each, in his own way, has left vital testaments to the existence and reality of the remarkable men and women they have met along a half century of seeking knowledge, wisdom, and illumination.

Michael Sugich is the author of Signs on the Horizons: Meetings with Men of Knowledge and Illumination (which Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad has called a "masterpiece" and "a classic of contemporary writing on Islam") and Hearts Turn: Sinners, Seekers, Saints and the Road to Redemption (which Dr. 'Umar Faruq 'Abd-Allah called "a proclamation of hope in dark times and a harbinger of grace"). A native of Santa Barbara, California in the United States, he studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and the California Institute of the Arts. He embraced Islam and entered a traditional Sufi order in 1972. Since that time he has studied Islam and Sufi doctrine with spiritual masters across the Arab and Islamic world. He lived for twenty-two years in the precincts of the sacred city of Makkah al-Mukarrama where he kept company with many men of knowledge and illumination. He is the author of four of the nine books in the Exemplars for Our Time series and served, alongside Peter Sanders, as Series Editor. He lives in Istanbul.

Dr. Mostafa al-Badawi was a student and disciple of Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad from 1979 until his master’s death in 1995. He has devoted the last thirty-five years to the translation into English and interpretation of the knowledge and wisdom of the Ba ‘Alawi Way. His English translations from the Arabic works by Imam ‘Abd Allah al-Haddad include The Book of Assistance, The Lives of Man, Gifts for the Seeker, Knowledge and Wisdom, Three Treatises, The Sublime Treasures, and Counsels of Religion. He has also translated Key to the Garden by Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad and Degrees of the Soul by Shaykh ‘Abdal-Khaliq al-Shabrawi.
In addition to his translation work he has authored Sufi Sage of Arabia, a biography of Imam al-Haddad; Man and the Universe; Ancient Prophets of Arabia; A Higher Reality: Manifestations of the Unseen; Twilight of a World; The Prophetic Invocations; Spiritual Significance in Islamic Architecture; and A Blessed Valley: Wadi Hadramawt and the ‘Alawi Tradition Volume 1. Volume 2 of A Blessed Valley is scheduled for publication in 2022. The author is currently writing a full biography of Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad.
Dr. al-Badawi is a practicing psychiatrist and lives in al-Madinah al-Munawwara in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Peter Sanders is the world’s pre-eminent photographer of the culture and spirituality of Islam. Over a period of more than fifty years, he has captured over a half million images that reflect a rich, diverse and ravishing traditional civilization filled with warm humanity and deep compassion. Several of his photographs have become iconic symbols of Islam as a serene and contemplative religion that stand in stark contrast to the sensational images of extremism and violence that dominate the headlines.
He began his career in the 1960s as one of London’s leading rock and roll photographers and his images of Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, The Doors and Marc Bolan, among others, are today considered classics of the period.
After an intensive spiritual search, which took him to India, Sanders returned to England and discovered the Sufi Path of Islam. Over the next five decades he has traveled across the Muslim world from the sacred cities of Makkah, Madinah and Jerusalem to the remote deserts of Mauretania, Mali and Morocco, from the island town of Lamu in East Africa to the valley of Hud in Hadramaut, from Kosovo to Malaysia and Indonesia, and across Muslim China photographing the people and places shaped by Islam.
His first published photographic essay, In the Shade of the Tree, is considered a classic visual presentation of the traditional Islamic world. His subsequent publication, The Art of Integration, is a landmark photo-essay of Muslims in Britain that has been heralded as a cultural bridge, which HM King Charles III (then the Prince of Wales) wrote, “shows with great clarity how our human spirit simultaneously embraces both faith and nationality."
Meetings with Mountains, his acclaimed photoessay of Muslim saints from around the world, published in 2019, formed the basis for the Exemplars for Our Time project for which he served as co-series editor and contributed many of the images that have illustrated this nine book set.
He lives in Buckinghamshire in the UK.