During his upbringing in a Sufi family in the 1990s in Cairo, Muhammad Sami never heard the word “Sufism” at home. At some level, he recognized that his peers were not all raised to pray at Al-Hussein Mosque on Fridays or to read Al-Busiri’s poem Al-Burda, yet he also had little understanding that his family’s practices were condemned by a parallel Islamic current.

As a university student during the Egyptian revolution, Sami was driven to seek personal meaning amid political turmoil. “I had an existential crisis for some time; I didn’t want to have contradictory beliefs. I thought, if religion doesn’t have a deeper meaning, if it’s not true and divine, I might as well not want it,” he recounts to Al-Monitor, explaining his search for the spiritual and intellectual aspects of faith.

He noticed that many young people either lost their religious faith as the Muslim Brotherhood entered the public sphere or were drawn closer to religion while seeking an alternative, often “Sufi,” interpretation.

By then, Sami had already embraced and found his place in religion after many months of reading, watching YouTube videos, and attending religion classes and gatherings with various Sufi orders. One of his major influences was an early season of Ali al-Jifri’s TV program, “The Spiritual Aspirant,” the last few episodes of which tackled the importance of following a sheikh, a spiritual leader of a Sufi order. Sami then start searching for an order that would resonate with him, eventually finding his heart with the Yemen-centered Alawiyyah. “Before this, religion was merely part of my identity, but then it became a relationship between God and myself,” he explains.