I took the long way home.
From a courtyard in Fes to fifteen acres in the Blue Ridge — every gate I walked through was teaching me the same thing. Here's the journey, honestly.
Where the questions began
I was born in Fes, a city of saints, scholars, and silence. I lost my father before I was old enough to remember him — barely a year and a month old. That early absence set me questioning young: about God, about grief, about what a life is even for. My faith was never handed to me as a doctrine — it grew as I lived.
The leap across the ocean
I came to America with a suitcase and a hunger to build a life of my own.
The mind, sharpened
I trained my head to its edge — engineering, logic, precision. I was good at it.
The climb begins
My first real steps up the corporate ladder.
The first time I built something that gave back
I founded a nonprofit, craftingloveandhope.org, supporting girls across eight villages in Morocco with STEM education, and refugee women in the U.S. with livelihood skills. I made meditation cushions by hand, and their proceeds sent girls to school. In the summers, I took the girls on field trips into tech companies — this photo is one, at Microsoft's Casablanca office — so they could see the doors that were open to them. It was the first time I understood: my gifts were never meant to stay mine.
When the body first spoke
My first miscarriage. The beginning of a grief that would become, in time, my greatest teacher.
The truth beneath the grief
A second loss. And in the silence that followed, I finally heard it: my body wasn't failing me. It was trying to save me. It was the first time I understood what alignment actually means.
With my own hands
After two miscarriages, doctors offered me what they always offer — surgery and IVF. But something in me said no. A quiet voice whispered: you are your own healer. So I listened. I juiced celery every morning, meditated, and visualized light moving through my body. Within five weeks, a grapefruit-sized ovarian cyst had vanished. That was the moment I knew: the power to heal, transform, and become is already within us. My kitchen became my first medicine.
The miracle
After everything — a life, in my arms. My daughter, Muna. Proof that the body I'd been at war with had been on my side all along.
Following it to the land
Not away from a hollow — toward a truer life. To nature. To depth. So I followed it, bought fifteen acres in the Blue Ridge, and began to build with my own hands.
The temple
The land became Munaya — a place women travel to, to come home to themselves.
The vessel
The way to help women do what I once had to do alone: remember who they were before the world told them who to be.
I help women find their way home.
Everything I learned the long, hard way — I've turned into a path you don't have to walk alone.
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