اقْرَأْ بِاسْمِ رَبِّكَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ
“Read in the name of your Lord who created.” — Quran 96:1
Scholarship & Spirituality
Islamic Scholarship & Sufism
Aslam Hayat built his professional career in accountancy and civil aviation. He spent his personal life building a library. By the time he passed away, he had accumulated thousands of books spanning Islamic theology, Sufi philosophy, world history, comparative religion, cosmology, and political thought. The books were not decoration. He read them. He marked them. He returned to them. They fed directly into 650 published articles and a way of seeing the world that everyone who knew him recognised.
For decades he read the major figures in the Islamic tradition of Tasawwuf — scholars, saints, philosophers, and mystics who addressed the inner dimensions of faith.
Shaykh Abdul Qadir al-Jilani
Founder of the Qadiriyya order; master of Islamic jurisprudence and spiritual teaching
Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
Author of Ihya Ulum al-Din; philosopher of the spiritual sciences
Jalaluddin Rumi
Persian poet and Sufi mystic; author of the Masnavi
Ali Hujwiri (Data Ganj Bakhsh)
Author of Kashf al-Mahjub; patron saint of Lahore
Lal Shahbaz Qalandar
Sufi saint of Sindh; revered across South Asia
Baba Farid
Punjabi Sufi saint; among the earliest poets in the Punjabi language
Shaykh Zakariya Kandhlawi
Scholar and spiritual teacher of the Deobandi tradition
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
Theologian and philosopher; author of major Quranic commentary
Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi
Andalusian philosopher and mystic; among the most studied of all Sufi thinkers
Ibn Arabi & Spiritual Philosophy
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Among the scholars he studied, Ibn Arabi occupied a particularly important place. Aslam Hayat spent many years reading and contemplating Ibn Arabi's writings concerning the nature of existence, divine reality, human consciousness, and spiritual transformation.
Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) — Andalusian philosopher and mystic; among the most widely studied Sufi thinkers in Islamic intellectual history.
Ibn Arabi's vast body of work — including the Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations) and the Fusus al-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom) — addresses the deepest questions of existence, divine attributes, the human soul, and the nature of knowledge. For Aslam Hayat, studying these texts was not merely an academic exercise but a sustained spiritual practice spanning many years.
Comparative Religion & World Thought
Although deeply rooted in Islamic tradition, Aslam Hayat never limited himself to a single intellectual framework. He regularly explored works written by thinkers from diverse religious, philosophical, and scientific backgrounds — writers who addressed spirituality, compassion, consciousness, and the shared ethical values that connect humanity across cultures.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Teachings on compassion, mindfulness, and the ethics of human kindness
Karen Armstrong
Historian of religion and author on Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and compassion
Neil Douglas-Klotz
Scholar of Semitic spirituality and the Aramaic roots of sacred texts
Kabir Helminski
Translator of Rumi and writer on Sufi wisdom for contemporary readers
Deepak Chopra
Author on consciousness, spirituality, and the integration of science and faith
Science, Cosmology & Human Knowledge
He was particularly interested in questions concerning the origins of the universe, time, consciousness, and the relationship between scientific discovery and spiritual understanding. Rather than viewing science and spirituality as opposing forces, he regarded them as complementary efforts to understand reality.
Albert Einstein
Reflections on the nature of reality, time, space, and the relationship between science and spirituality
Stephen Hawking
Writings on cosmology, the origins of the universe, and the limits of human knowledge
Writing & Intellectual Legacy
The influence of these scholars and thinkers found direct expression in his own writing. Over more than twenty-five years, Aslam Hayat published over 650 articles in Vancouver's Pakistani community newspaper, The Miracle. His writings frequently explored: