From nuns in London to Sufi shaykhas in Damascus, Farrah Akbik recalls the women who shaped her childhood—and the dear friend who helped her escape them.

[Editor’s note: This article is part of Al-Jumhuriya’s “Gender, Sexuality, and Power” series. It was also published in Arabic on 29 November, 2018.]   Whether we take language to be an invisible, faithful scribe of reality, and of the collective symbolic and psychological system of any given meeting of humans, or whether it manufactures its own social reality subsequently; that’s to say, whether we suppose…