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Khalid Obasi is Bringing Ma'at Sophia to Harvard

There's a sign posted at the entrance of a scholarship office I once visited. It reads: "You Matter — You Belong." Four words, so simple they sound like they should settle the matter. They don't.

I've spent most of my life outside the circle those words describe — a Black youth in a White Catholic school who never wanted in, a man who found his spiritual ground not inside any tradition but on the margins of all of them. For a long time I thought that was the wound. I've come to believe it was the gift.

In a couple of weeks, I'm bringing that conviction to Harvard Divinity School.

I'll be in Cambridge to present at the HDS Program for the Evolution of Spirituality's 2026 conference, "Belonging: Practices of Inclusion in Spiritual Communities, the Academy, and Society," running September 21–22 (virtual) and September 24–26 (hybrid, in Cambridge). My paper is called "Non-Belonging as the Catalyst for Sovereign Spiritual Community," and its argument is simple to say, if not always simple to live: non-belonging isn't a deficit to be fixed. It's generative ground — the very soil fierce, self-authored identity grows from.

I chose three people (among the dozens I found) to support my claim. James Baldwin, cast out of family, church, and nation, who built a self from the inside out and told a friend, "The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it." Octavia Butler, bullied, dyslexic, one of the only Black women writing science fiction in a genre with no place prepared for her, who said she wrote herself into the world because the world hadn't written her in. And Thelonious Monk, told for years by his own peers that his music was simply wrong, who answered by staying exactly who he was until the world caught up.

And then there's my own story, which I include not because it belongs beside theirs in genius, but because it doesn't have to. You don't need to be a genius to authorize your own belonging. You just need the fierce intent to do it.

That intent is the same ground Ma'at Sophia: Afrikana Wisdom for a New World Story grows from. This paper and that book are companion pieces — the paper is the argument, the book is the testimony. What I call Afroposophy in Ma'at Sophia — an Afrikana approach to knowing and being that I didn't inherit from any institution but built from a lifetime spent on the margins — is the living proof of the paper's claim. The kingdom within doesn't stay within. It becomes communal.

If you've read Letters from an Old Black Man on Substack, or you've been walking with me through the writing of Ma'at Sophia, you already know this territory. I wanted you to be among the first to know it's headed to Harvard, not to worship, but to speak the truth about what has always lived in the margins.

Click the link to read the full paper below

https://www.maatsophia.com/s/Non-Belonging-as-the-Catalyst-for-Sovereign-Spiritual-Community-df32.pdf

If You Know You Know

Khalid Obasi

MA’AT SOPIA: AFRIKANA WISDOM FOR A NEW WORLD STORY