Path for the Perplexed is a new rendering of the classic work of Khwaja Abdallah Ansari of Herat’s Manazil as-Sa’irin. The book, co-authored with Ms Julia Katarina, is designed for modern spiritual seekers who desire to attain higher spiritual stations through a rigorous year-long programme of exercises, litanies and dhikrs. The book maps out the process by which seekers could reawaken and regain the essential inner faculties for such an achievement.

Prof Ali Allawi was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1947. He attended universities in the US and graduated from MIT (1968) and Harvard University (1971). He worked in economic development, first with the World Bank Group in Washington, and then as the managing director of an emerging markets investment bank. He was active in the opposition to the dictatorship in Iraq and subsequently served in the post 2003 Iraqi government as Minister of Trade and Minister of Finance. In 2020, he was named as the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq. He was also active academically as a writer and scholar, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard, Princeton and Oxford universities. He was a Research Professor at the National University of Singapore. He has published many award-winning books of biography, politics, economics and on Islam, all published by Yale University Press. 

Prof Ali Allawi has been a long time adherent of the ‘irfani/Sufi tradition.

Julia A. Katarina is an English German mezzo-soprano, oud player and cellist who taught music for nearly 4 years in Palestine, where she learned fluent Arabic and embraced Islam in Masjid al-Aqsa. She taught singing, both European classical repertoire and Arabic song, cello and music theory at music schools and centres around the West Bank and also taught voice at The Freedom Theatre, Jenin. Previously she co-founded and toured with a chamber opera company in Britain, singing the title role in a fully staged production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice. Julia has completed three opera courses, including a Diploma at Birkbeck College, University of London. More recently, she has been learning to play Qawwali, Persian and Arabic music on the cello, as well as to accompany her Arabic singing with the cello and the oud. She regularly plays cello and oud and sings at arts events, conferences, multicultural and Sufi festivals and weddings, usually alternating between instruments, cultures and repertoires within a single engagement. Since Returning from Palestine in 2012 Julia has completed an MSc in Applied Music Psychology at the University of Roehampton, where she conducted quantitative experimental research into the perceptual connections between music and colour, as well as giving many recitals and performing the role of Hansel in the university’s first ever fully staged opera production. After graduating, she worked for Palestinian charity, Open Bethlehem, co-ordinating the national release of the documentary film of the same title. In January 2016 Julia started her social enterprise, UnityMusic موسيقى توحيد, giving concerts and workshops to diaspora communities in Britain, Germany and Greece, where she also worked for Save the Children. She collaborated with the Amos Trust on their Just Walk to Jerusalem, playing music in refugee camps in Greece Palestine and Lebanon. Julia had now completed her MA in Islamic Law at the Islamic College of Advanced Studies, accredited by Middlesex University and is planning to continue with traditional Hawza seminary studies and a PhD in Islamic Music inshAllah