Quote by Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari: “The darkest hour is the sign that dawn is near.”

When things feel most hopeless, you may in fact be closer to a turning point than at any earlier stage. Extreme difficulty is not necessarily a sign that you have failed — it may simply be the final stage before things change.

Ibn Ata Allah wrote his Hikam in Cairo during the Mamluk Sultanate, in the decades following the devastating Mongol destruction of Baghdad and the collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate. His aphorisms offered spiritual grounding to a community living through trauma and uncertainty.

Egyptian Sufi scholar and author born around 1250 in Alexandria, whose Hikam (Book of Aphorisms) is one of the most treasured works in Sufi literature, read and memorised across the Islamic world to this day. He was a leading figure of the Shadhili Sufi order.