THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

One of Noor's most memorable sermons happened in 2017 - a surprise, considering it was largely an improvisation. After a scheduling hitch left Noor with less than half of the 45-minutes she should have had, she shortened her talk and changed tack: leading the congregation in a meditation.

"She asked us to track our emotions in our bodies, and let them run their course," recalled Nurjahan Boulden, who was in the audience that day. "I didn't know it was even possible to own and control your emotions like that, but it worked."

Boulden had come to Noor's sermon that day not knowing what she would find. Before that sermon, she was haunted by a destructive guilt she carried.

She grew up with a love for belly-dancing - a practice inherited from her Baloch mother - but also hearing a lot of "if you do this, you'll burn in hell". That belief took hold inside her, and began to grow. Then, she was shot in the leg in a nightclub in Toronto in 2006. Boulden, a college student at the time, overheard one of her aunts say, "She was out dancing, what did she expect?"

Then, she conceived a child out of wedlock with her Christian partner. After they married, they had several miscarriages, and so the guilt grew again. She got to a point where she believed her misfortunes resulted from not conforming to religious traditions.

Noor offered Boulden another frame. "I didn't tell her she was wrong for feeling punished," Noor said. "I helped her to look at it differently and asked, 'What else is true?'" Noor told her that God had given her the talent of dancing and that it wasn't a shameful practice, like many thought. She told her that her intentions - what's in her heart - is what mattered. If she felt happiest belly dancing, , then dancing was how she was meant to connect with God.

Boulden was in disbelief.

"You're the guide I had been waiting for," Boulden told her.

Noor was also in disbelief. She had never seen herself as someone that people had been waiting for.

Noor grew up in a pious family in Karachi, Pakistan. Everyone in the house prayed five times a day. At the time, women weren't allowed in the mosque in Karachi (although that is now changing). But Noor also had women to look up to: her mother Naima had memorized the Arabic scriptures and was usually the designated prayer leader in the house.

In the summer of 2000, when Noor was 16, her family migrated to the US and moved into a townhouse in Culver City, California. On their street, in this upper middle-class suburb of about 40,000 people, old ficus trees formed an archway. There were few Muslims in the town - they represent only about 1% of the population even now - but in the first couple of months after settling in to her California home, she went to a giant prayer for an Eid celebration at the Los Angeles convention center.

She was amazed. It was the first time she would pray in public. Noor wore a blue and yellow salwar kameez she had brought in her suitcase from Karachi, silver earrings with small blue stones that hung down to her chin and two dozen bangles around her henna tattooed wrists. The teenager was mesmerized by the ethnic and gender diversity in the crowd. She saw the power of praying outside the house, in communion.

Her new life was already teaching her what kind of religious leader she wanted to be - although she had not yet realized she wanted to become one.

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