Creative direction and interview: Jessica Michault
Photography: Ali Al Riffai
Styling: Eman Al Sarraf
Make-up: Safa Al Riffai
Hair: Samer Khalaf
Agency: 217 Public Relations
Assistants: Marwa Janahi & Zainab Al Hashimi

Shaikha Haya M. Al Khalifa has a sewing machine. Like generations of women before her, she has found sanctuary, solace and, importantly, inspiration in this most revolutionary of devices. After all, with the comforting familiarity of stitching, the complexity of threading, and the twists and turns of fabric, could one device hold more appropriate metaphors
for life?

For Shaikha Haya, her sewing machine is symbolic of a creative journey she was once immersed in, but which, for reasons which will unfold over our hour-long conversation, she lost confidence in; before emerging, butterfly-like from a chrysalis of self-doubt to reclaim her spirit and self-belief.

“So now I have a sewing machine,” she laughs at her rediscovered creative endeavour. “I want to merge both this and my art together. In between creating and the fact there is always something happening, the concept is always there.”

It’s been four years since Shaikha Haya sat on a white sofa in a chic Layeur cotton-silk dress for a YouTube video titled: Why do I feel empty even though I have everything? With her measured reasoning and thoughtful, compassionate stance, she showed, during the first stirrings of the pandemic, that she was unafraid of asking the big questions.

And now, a rewarding though occasionally bumpy creative journey and the arrival of her daughter later, meeting with Villa 88 in her home country of Bahrain, it’s clear this intelligent, thoughtful woman doesn’t shy away from answering the big questions either.

Renowned for being independent, reserved and private, like precious gemstones, interviews with Shaikha Haya are rare. And like gems, there are many facets to the Shaikha. Dimensions, it transpires, and she is eager to share. “Life is so fast,” she reasons, “you can put on multiple hats.”

So how many hats does Shaikha Haya wear? Let’s see, there’s wife, sister, daughter and mother, the latter of which she declares: “It’s a beautiful gift. Life tastes better and everything tastes better, looks better, there’s a new lens through which you see the world.”

Then there’s her cerebral side which she indulges with her favourite hobby – “reading” – and her spiritual side which she carefully nurtures while advising others to do the same, recommending: “Have an hour for yourself every day to exercise a muscle, whether that’s physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.”

It is her creative side, however, which is the facet that shines the most. Four years spent studying fashion design in Bahrain opened her eyes to the myriad directions her innate creativity and talent could take her. 

“It’s interesting because my mother was and still is an artist and we have a lot of family members who are also artists; we were brought up around a lot of art,” she says. “I was lucky in that there was no say from my parents about what to study, which was amazing. So I studied fashion design here in Bahrain for four years and it was the most exciting time because I was exploring my creativity. And when you have art and then you add design it is purposeful and useful.”

Her youthful energy and exuberance however would take a knock at that often unforgiving place everyone visits at one point or another – the university of life – resulting in some difficult life lessons that sent her temporarily off-course.

“They didn’t have Fashion Trust Arabia, none of that,” she says of her post-graduate experience as a new designer. “The infrastructure to support the budding fashion design scene was just beginning, and you really had to believe in yourself. To be so young and to have that… I had to have courage and confidence which I didn’t have, so I stopped around 2016. I kept changing the name of my brand, thinking that maybe if I changed the name I would have more confidence.”

A spell as an art teacher followed, which she calls a “beautiful journey”, before, as she puts it: “my real life started at 26.”

The Shaikha does not have a big internet presence. Type her name into Google and the search results are few and far between, a fact she acknowledges with a casual, “I notice there is very little”.  That doesn’t mean, however, that she doesn’t have a big online presence. Through her weekly email newsletter and popular courses with a focus on self-improvement, she amassed a “community” of over 16,000 people who were drawn to her warmth and ability to cut through the vagaries of modern life to get to the core of contentment. The newsletter was an endeavour which stemmed from her belief in the benefits of journalling and self-reflection; an undertaking she attributes to turning 26 and regaining her confidence through being inspired by the 99 Names of Allah.

“I had to find my character and my way and that’s when the journey was born through gratitude and that I was able to use the 99 Names of Allah,” she says. “The giver, the peacemaker… I read them, but I had never activated them, and that’s how I started my journal. Then it sold out within the year. First batch, second batch, third batch, every time it sold out and I had never even shown my face!”

Based on the popular Five-Minute Journal in which you note down the defining moments of your day, Shaikha Haya’s journal used the 99 Names of Allah as inspiration along with affirmations: “Every day I would prompt you to choose a name and with gratitude, you would fill in the blank.”

Thanks to the journal’s popularity, the US multinational company Johnson & Johnson approached her to be a spokesperson for their ‘Power of Gentle’ campaign.

“That’s when I thought, ‘Okay wait, I need to show my face, this is a milestone.’ And I posted about it and I shared it and people kept calling me and asking: ‘We don’t understand, what is gratitude? What is self-love? What is this?’ Because there was nothing like this online in 2017.”

The impact of her forays into a more public life opened new avenues for her to explore her spiritual side, and in 2018 she developed her first online course The Self-Love Journey, attracting an audience from Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and beyond.

“No one knew what Zoom was,” she says, laughing at how unimaginable that is in this post-pandemic world. “You’d have to explain to people how they could join and attend the event. It was very exciting because then I turned it into a real course.”

Another course, Happy Life, with a focus on manifesting followed, along with Morning Routine filled with tips on how to establish effective daily practices or, as she succinctly puts it: “How to get your act together.”

“My purpose is to share and to allow women to live with inner peace,” she says. “I specifically want to reach more Arab women. I used Arabic for the courses, not because I don’t know English, but because there wasn’t enough Arabic content on the internet.”

Reinvention, rediscovery, purpose, and perhaps, more importantly, the return of the confidence she lost in her early 20s, Shaikha Haya credits her husband, who is a Kuwaiti entrepreneur, her daughter and, importantly, herself with finding new paths down which to walk, forging them herself where necessary.

“I’m currently at that crossroads,” she says of her extended hiatus from her courses, newsletter, fashion design and Journalling with Haya channel. “I reduced all of this as I felt that the market was very saturated. Before, it was a blue ocean, but now not so much. But I keep telling myself, your voice matters and what you say is still different from how anyone else would say it. 

For me, I believe that joy and inner peace are two sides to the same coin and this is what we’re trying to establish.”

Which brings us back to the sewing machine. “I told you I had stopped doing fashion, well, now that my fashion and art are merging I recently started sewing again. Today, I also share mini blogs. They’re not lecturing anyone about anything, they’re showing a way of being, living, prioritising.”

The Shaikha is big on priorities. At the forefront of her mind is how she can give back, not only to her community, but also to her country: “The new chapter is forming. There is something that will come out of it, but I can’t touch it yet.”

“I owe something to my country and I want to give back,” she says. “I have such gratitude for Bahrain and Bahrainis and their kindness. I really appreciate our people.

“I believe as women in the Arab community, there’s a lot of feminine power. And it’s not about females in the physical form, it’s about the feminine energy that is rising. It’s not about the numbers you’ve achieved, but what you’ve become and that’s a beautiful journey to have with yourself.”

Yes, Shaikha Haya wears many hats. She’s been the artistic little girl, the bright-eyed graduate, the young woman, a little wiser, a little more cautious, each version of herself a stepping stone to where she finds herself today in her creative era, unafraid and untethered. Her excitement is palpable.

“A lot of people told me: ‘Don’t forget yourself when you have a daughter’,” she smiles. “But, you know, I never left that Haya in the dark.”

Follow @hayaalkhalifa.co on Instagram.