03 ISSUE VII
SEPTEMBER 2025
SEPTEMBER 2025
Ten Thousand Dreams
Peter Sanders’ photographs offer a rare visual archive of Muslim life that is not filtered through crisis reporting, orientalist fascination, or simplistic cultural narratives.
By Zoya Sait
In the summer of 2023, I spent time researching Sufism and visiting zawiyas. A zawiya is an institution where spiritual gatherings take place, a monastery for those practicing Sufism, a mosque, an educational center, and most importantly, a communal space.
All images by Peter Sanders.
After meeting a professor in Turkey, I was invited to Morocco to visit the Zawiya of Sidi Jamal, also known as the Boutchich zawiya. The event took place in Saïdia, a coastal town on the border of Algeria and Morocco. Thousands had gathered for the celebration of the birth of Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم). Over the span of a week, I observed children and the elderly, locals and foreigners, converts and born Muslims, come together to recite the Quran and poems, sending salutations to Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم). The experience was surreal, sometimes unnerving, as I had no experience of Islam from a spiritual perspective. Up until this point in my spiritual journey, I was mainly exposed to the mosque, prayers and Quran through my grandparents.
While I was there, in a passing conversation about photography and writing, someone mentioned Peter Sanders to me. Peter is a British photographer who converted to Islam in the 1970s and became one of the first converts to document Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. His photographs before his conversion featured rock and roll icons such as Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Elton John. Now at the age of 79, he has a photographic library that encompasses his physical journey around the world and spiritual evolution.
A month later, Peter was speaking at an event. I asked him about one photograph: the rooftop of Masjid al-Nabawi.
The Masjid al-Nabawi, above, is the second mosque built by the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. The mosque was originally the home of his second wife, Aisha, and he is buried with two of his closest companions, Abu Bakr and Umar Ibn Al-Khattab. When the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) was expelled from Mecca, he found refuge in Madinah. Many pilgrims traditionally complete their pilgrimage in Mecca and come to Masjid al-Nabawi, recounting the experience of a certain lightness in the air.
This image stayed with me.
There are no photographs of the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم), and very few physical relics. Somehow, Peter had managed to capture a visual memory of the Prophet’s resting place, emotionally layered and unseen. I kept wondering how he processed the light that is transmitted through the grave, through the eyes of the pious, and ultimately, through the lens of a camera.
I wanted to know how he had done it logistically. But more than that, I wanted to understand the artist behind the lens—someone who could capture a whole range of emotions with that much depth and care.
We stayed in touch over Zoom in the following months. I found myself asking Peter about tasawwuf (i.e. Sufism, the spiritual dimension of Islam and its practices), about dreams, his experiences traveling through Muslim communities around the world. He has photographed scholars, locals, and religious sites from Yemen to Palestine, North Africa, and recently, China.
What stood out was not only the scale of his travels, but his perspective. His photographs are rooted in respect and intimacy, instead of distance or spectacle. They offer a rare visual archive of Muslim life that is not filtered through crisis reporting, orientalist fascination or simplistic cultural narratives.
The more I learned about Peter and his archive, the more I saw a reflection of my own search for meaning. His work is more than just documenting people or places. It is about the larger journey of trying to understand oneself and the world more deeply. That search for meaning, beauty, and connection resonated with me. It still does.
Today, I am working on preserving this archive, a collection of nearly half a million photographs spanning decades and continents. The images include portraits of saints and scholars, scenes from spiritual gatherings, mosques across the Muslim world, and everyday life in Muslim communities. Some of my favorite photographs are from his most recent book, Heaven, Earth & The Ten Thousand Things, where Peter captures the historical sites, dignity and beauty of Muslim spaces often overlooked by mainstream narratives.
My work includes securing funding, developing a sustainable digitization plan, supporting exhibitions, and identifying a permanent institutional home for the collection. It also requires managing the structural realities of preservation: intellectual property issues, legal frameworks, tax structures, and long-term strategies to protect the archive while ensuring meaningful access. Beyond the logistics, there are the daily decisions that require balancing urgency with care.
Preserving an archive like this requires confronting the reality that, without deliberate action, Muslim histories continue to be misrepresented, marginalized, or lost.
At a recent event in Bradford, in the UK, someone recognized their grandfather in one of Peter’s photographs. It served as a reminder that personal archives are not merely collections of images. They connect people to their own histories, to ideas, to shared experiences across time and place. In a time when physical spaces tied to Muslim identity are being destroyed or erased, from the demolition of mosques under Modi's government in India to the displacement of refugee communities across the world, the need to protect visual memory becomes even more urgent. When physical spaces are no longer accessible, archives like Peter's offer a different kind of connection, allowing people to encounter what might otherwise be lost.
The project of preserving memory is not nostalgic; it is necessary.
It is not limited to reclaiming physical territory or political authority. It is also about asserting the right to document, interpret, and transmit history on our own terms. It is about refusing to allow our communities to be reduced to afterthoughts or abstractions in someone else's archives. Visual archives are part of this work, but so are sound archives and oral histories. Peter’s lesser-known recordings of the call to prayer and spiritual gatherings across North Africa form another layer of this preservation effort. By capturing memory across multiple formats, the archive resists the fragmentation that displacement and erasure often cause. It ensures that memory is not flattened into a single narrative but remains textured, expansive, and available to future generations on their own terms.
Zoya Sait is a curator, photographer, and operations lead behind the Peter Sanders Foundation.