He is not the subject of this website. He is the reason it exists.
Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani
Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani was born in Larnaca, Cyprus, and came to be known by many honorifics — Sultan al-Awliya, Mawlana, as-Sayyid Khwaja Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Haqqani al-Rabbani al-Qubrusi al-Firdausi an-Naqshbandi among them.
He traced his lineage to the eleventh-century Sufi Abdul Qadir Jilani and the thirteenth-century Anatolian mystic Jalaluddin Rumi; his maternal and paternal grandfathers had themselves been sheikhs in the Qadiri and Mevlevi orders.
He became one of the most widely recognized teachers of the Naqshbandi-Haqqani order, drawing students from across the world to Cyprus and to Lefke, where he lived and taught for decades.
The Encounter.
In the summer of 2001, Atiya Khan was in Karachi after several months in Canada. Her marriage was falling apart. Her daughter had just been born. She was in that suspended state where you are waiting for your life to show you what comes next.
A few months earlier, staying at her husband's relatives in Canada, she had attended a Zikr gathering. On the wall was a photograph of an old man in a turban. Something in her was pulled toward it — not a thought, not a decision, just a pull.
Then she flew back to Pakistan and forgot about it.
Three months later, a guest staying at the family house went to the airport to collect a visiting Shaykh. She called Atiya afterwards. She had thought of her. Shaykh Nazim was in Karachi and if she wanted to meet him, she had to come immediately.
Atiya was ready to leave. Her father-in-law sat her down. Thousands of people would be there, she would never get close, it was not worth the trouble. He kept her beside him the whole day.
As they sat in the garden for evening tea, three women walked in wearing turbans — disciples who had come with Shaykh Nazim from Cyprus. They looked at Atiya. One of them said: you must come with us. You belong to Shaykh Nazim.
They asked her father-in-law's permission. He gave it. And that was how she went.
The Room
At the Governor's house, thousands of people were waiting. Shaykh Nazim had not come down — his knees were giving him pain.
Because she was with his close disciples, Atiya went straight to his room. She saw an old man in discomfort and felt sorry for him. She remembered a balm her father-in-law made for her mother's knees and sent for it.Before it arrived, he insisted on going down to address the crowd himself.
When he returned, the disciples applied the balm. Then they left him to rest.
She had been there as if she belonged — though they had not exchanged a single word.
The Gathering
The next day there was a large gathering. When Atiya walked in she saw a different man. The frail elder she had felt sorry for the night before had been replaced by something else entirely — a blazing concentration of presence and energy that she had not encountered before and could not explain.
People were asking him questions. He pointed at her and said: you — ask me a question.
She declined. He pointed again. She declined again. The disciples came to her: you must answer the third time.
She decided, quietly, to test him. She would ask one question aloud. And she would hold a second question in her heart — unspoken, invisible — and see what he did with it.
The spoken question was about her husband's family and the financial difficulties they were facing. God is kind, she said, but why do troubles come to us?
He answered about hardship and blessing —
about Adam, about the ratio of suffering to grace, about attachment to this world. That in a person's life there is always this ratio: four things go wrong, then one thing goes right and erases all of it. That troubles come from too much attachment to the things of this world.
And then he stopped.
And he turned directly to her. And he said:
But what do you have to do with any of this?
He had left the spoken question behind. He was answering the one she had held in silence.
He spoke about the people of heaven. About how when they are given the fragrance of heaven it will not feel new or strange — it will feel like returning home after a long journey. He asked her to imagine being in heaven for a hundred years. Then a thousand. Then a million. And still wanting more. He asked: what comes after a million years of that?
Then he pointed at her head.
Then comes creation.
She did not fully understand the word. But she felt it as an explosion — or an activation — something that moved through her in a way that language has never quite been able to hold.
It is still, in some ways, a mystery. But the vague sense that has persisted since that morning in Karachi, in the summer before everything changed, is this:
I am here to create something.
Twenty-three years later, she is still finding out what that something is.
What He Left Behind
Before leaving Karachi, Shaykh Nazim asked one of his disciples to stay behind to help her.
She took Atiya to shrines across the city, introducing her to saints and sacred places she would not otherwise have found. And she kept insisting, again and again, that they had to go to someone she called Usman Marvandi.
Nobody seemed to know who that was.
Weeks later, the attacks of September 11th changed the way the world spoke about Islam.
Atiya watched a faith she knew from the inside be reduced, almost overnight, to its most violent caricature. It was in that atmosphere that she was sent to Sehwan on a television commission — to film the Urs, the festival of a saint whose shrine drew thousands each year. She had no reason to connect the assignment to anything Shaykh Nazim had said. It was simply work.
It was only afterwards that she learned the saint whose Urs she had filmed was Lal Shahbaz Qalandar — Usman Marvandi. The same name the disciple in Karachi had kept repeating, months before, to someone who had no idea who that was.
She did not go to Sehwan because Shaykh Nazim had pointed her there. She went for work, at a moment when the world urgently needed another story about Islam than the one it was being told — and found, without knowing it, exactly where he had meant.
The Years That Followed
The 2001 meeting was the beginning of a teacher-student relationship, as well as a subject-and-documentarian one.
For years afterward, until his passing in 2014, Atiya returned once or twice a year to film him, building a body of footage unique in its intimacy — a look at the saint in his personal life. Many media outlets had asked to document him this way. He had always refused.
His gatherings were divided, as was customary — women on one side, men on the other. Cameras were never otherwise permitted on the women's side, where hijab was observed, nor was any woman otherwise allowed among the men.
Shaykh Nazim made an exception — calling Atiya to interview him on the men's side in the company of his close disciples, who were always present.
He made many such exceptions for her over the years that followed — telling her to get a divorce, and asking her to continue working.
He also gave her something beyond access: a support system in Pakistan that would go on to make her religious television series possible, bringing the country's ulema on board in a way she could not have achieved alone.
It came at a moment when it was dangerous to speak about these things at all — Wahhabi ideology had come to dominate the public conversation about Islam, and Sufis, along with anyone who did not accept that ideology, were being openly branded as kafir. People were frightened to talk about religion; the wrong word, in the wrong place, could get someone killed.
Shaykh Nazim encouraged her, and gave her the strength to take that risk regardless.
Separately, over the years, he also helped her understand the often confusing aspects of the Qalandars — the Malangs, their practices, the world she was documenting at Sehwan, which was not always easy to make sense of as it was unlike the Islam she was accustomed to.
Succession
Shaykh Nazim passed away in 2014. He was succeeded by his son, Shaykh Mehmet Adil, who continues to lead the order today. Atiya's connection to Shaykh Nazim's teaching did not end with his death — it continued through his son, in conversations that carry forward, in a different generation, the same lineage that began in that room in Karachi.