The American Muslim Podcast · El-Amin Communications

Naazish Yarkhan: Overcoming Fear Through Storytelling, Faith, and Community

·58 min·4 clips

Yarkhan connects her family's justice ethic to her mother helping an injured man and her father meeting the president of India.

The conversation starts with what formed her. Imam Tariq Al-Amin introduces Sister Nazish Yarhan as the founder of the Writer's Studio U.S., then asks what shaped her path. She answers with stories, not theory. A letter written to request a meeting becomes part of a family habit: take the step, ask, try. Then she talks about her parents, already in their later years, building a house, choosing windows, finding a contractor, and carrying on after that contractor went bankrupt. To her, their courage did not look dramatic. It looked normal, because she grew up around people who kept solving the thing in front of them. That is where fear starts to shrink. Hesitation and doubt can be treated as mental chatter instead of instructions. The host follows the thread into her work with young writers. Does that upbringing help her guide students as they form ideas and answer prompts? Yarhan says yes. She sees students miss the weight of what they have already done, even when those small choices took muscle, nerve, or patience. Storytelling becomes a way of noticing yourself properly. Her coaching sounds less like polishing essays and more like helping young people recognize the strength already sitting inside their own experiences. Faith stays underneath the whole exchange. Peace, appreciation, family, and shared courage give the talk its shape without making it preachy. By the end, courage feels communal: learned by doing, and also by watching someone else keep going.

As heard by us

A warm, grounded conversation about courage, writing, and learning by doing.

The conversation follows Nazish Yarhan, founder of the Writer's Studio U.S., and it works best when it stays close to the lived details that shaped her outlook.

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Why you'd press play

You want a reflective conversation with Sister Nazish Yarhan about a family-formed confidence and the writing work she built around it.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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