M. Ali Lakhani

M. Ali Lakhani, KC, lawyer, author, and poet, was born and educated in England.  He studied law at Cambridge University, and has practised in the profession as an advocate in Vancouver, Canada, for over 45 years.

Lakhani has published several books and essays exploring perennial philosophy, justice, religion, and modernity—including The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam, The Timeless Relevance of Traditional Wisdom, Faith and Ethics: The Vision of the Ismaili Imamat, and When the Rose Blooms. His writing and lectures have addressed topics ranging from metaphysics and literature to Islamophobia and human dignity.

He lives in Vancouver with his family and continues to write and engage in public discourse on philosophical, spiritual, and cultural themes.

Sacred Web and Major Publications

In 1998, Mr. Lakhani founded Sacred Web: A Journal of Tradition and Modernity, which he edited till it ceased print publication in 2023, after a run of 50 volumes. The journal’s focus was on articulating the metaphysical principles of the wisdom traditions and, in particular, their application to issues of the modern world. Sacred Web attracted contributions from many scholars of the Sophia Perennis, and was considered the leading journal in its field, garnering accolades and endorsements from many renowned scholars, including Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Karen Armstrong, and Huston Smith. HRH Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales (as he then was) introduced both the Sacred Web Conferences hosted by Mr. Lakhani, in Edmonton in 2006, and Vancouver in 2014. Volume 40 of Sacred Web, which was dedicated to the teachings of Frithjof Schuon, contained Mr. Lakhani’s essay, ‘Standing Unshakably in the True’, a commentary of Schuon’s philosophy based on his ‘World Wheel’ cycle of poems. 

Mr. Lakhani has published four books and has contributed many essays to journals on matters relating to law and traditional metaphysics. His essay on ‘The Metaphysics of Human Governance: Imam ‘Ali, Truth and Justice’ was awarded First Prize at the Imam ‘Ali International Conference in Iran in 2001. That essay and the Second Prize essay by Dr. Reza Shah-Kazemi were described by Dr. Nasr, in his introduction to the anthology, The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam (World Wisdom Books, 2006, ed. by Lakhani) as “among the best writings on this extraordinary figure (‘Ali Ibn Abi Talib) in Western languages and are obligatory reading for anyone interested in ‘Ali but not familiar with Islamic languages.” Mr. Lakhani’s other publications include an anthology of his own essays, The Timeless Relevance of Traditional Wisdom (World Wisdom Books, 2010), an intellectual biography of His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan, Faith and Ethics: The Vision of the Ismaili Imamat (I.B. Tauris and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2017), and a book of spiritual aphorisms written in the late 1980s, When the Rose Blooms (The Matheson Trust, 2021).