Every time I sit before someone who hears the word "coaching" for the first time, I can almost watch the sentence form in their eyes before they say it: this is something foreign to us, imported from the West, dressed up in Arabic clothes. And I don't blame them — I respect the caution. They have seen too much sold under shiny names with no root in our soil, and so they have learned to ask about the origin before they ask about the fruit. That is a noble question.
So let me not dress things up; let me be straight with you. I will tell you where this craft truly comes from — not its recent history, but its deeper root. And I will make a claim before you that may sound large, then show you how it is truer than the denial: that coaching, rightly understood, is not an import from the West, but a revival of a role our heritage has always known and honored — the role of the murabbi.
The Role Our Heritage Honored
Look at how our language, in its wisdom, distinguished between two men.
There is the muʿallim — the instructor, the teacher — and he holds great honor, for knowledge is light and the teacher carries it. But his craft, in its common form, is to pour information into a person: he fills the vessel from what he has, and the learner walks away stuffed with a knowledge that was not in them before.
And there is the murabbi — and this is another matter altogether. The murabbi does not pour; he grows. He does not fill from outside; he tends the seed already in a person until it bears fruit. He is the one who looks at whoever sits before him and sees not an empty vessel waiting to be filled, but living ground with a seed entrusted to it — and his craft is to nurture, to water, to shelter, until the shoot stands on its own stem. This is why the role of the murabbi was, for us, higher than that of the mere transmitter: because to grow a person from within is harder, and more honorable, than to drill information into them from without.
And look at the word itself, for it carries the whole matter. Tarbiya comes from rabbā — to make grow; the Arabs say "he rabbā a thing," meaning he nurtured it and made it grow until it was complete. So tarbiya, at the root of its own language, is not a filling-in from outside, but a growing-up and a tending-from-within — to tend the seed in a person until it bears fruit. Even God, exalted is He, when He recalls the raising of a servant, names it tarbiya: and say: My Lord, have mercy on them as they raised me when I was small (Qur'an 17:24) — that is, they grew me and tended me until I came into my own. For Rabb — in one of the faces of its meaning — is the One who grows and nurtures, who takes the creature from state to state until it reaches its completion.
Two Roads, One Truth
And here two roads meet at a single truth — exactly as Prophetic guidance and al-Balkhi's medicine met in this piece's companion (where I show you how the method of Somatic Thinking is itself no import, but a continuation of the wisdom of body and self in our own heritage).
Our word tarbiya is taken from growing and cultivating; and the word the West uses for what corresponds to it — "education" — traces to the Latin educare, which in their own dictionaries means to nourish, to bring up, to rear — that is, to make a thing grow. (There is a sister root, educere, "to draw out, to lead forth" what is in a person; and both circle the same meaning — to tend what is in a person until it shows, rather than to deposit in them what is not theirs.)
Consider the irony: even the West's own word for "education" means, at its deeper root, what our tarbiya meant from the very beginning — growing the human being from within, not pouring instruction in from outside. And then watch how usage drifted, on both sides, theirs and ours alike, until "education" came to mean, in most minds, stuffing and examining and drilling — and the original meaning, alive in both words, was forgotten. Indeed, when the British Empire carried its language and its schools across the earth, this narrowed meaning travelled with its reach, until it nearly effaced the root in every tongue it touched. And here I should correct a common misreading: the tarbiya we mean is not the raising of the young alone; it is the growing of the human being at every age — adults before children. Which is why coaching, being in essence the tarbiya of adults, has the strongest claim of all to this original meaning. The two roads did not meet by borrowing, nor by one taking from the other — they met because the truth is one: a human being is grown from within, in every tongue and on every land.
I am not claiming the Arabs took from the Latins, nor the Latins from the Arabs; this is no inquiry into the history of words. I am saying only that the meaning the tongues converged upon — that raising a human is a growth from within, not a filling from without — is a true and deeply human meaning, one our language knew and theirs knew, each on its own. Two roads, one truth.
So Where Does Coaching Stand in All This?
Now we return to the first question, with its key in hand.
What is coaching, in truth? Not instruction, not a prescription dictated, not an expert pouring his expertise into someone helpless and waiting. Coaching, at its best, is a companionship that wakes in a person what is already there, and helps them grow themselves. The coach does not bring you an answer from outside you; he sits with you until you hear your own answer — the one that was in you all along, unheard. He does not lead you where he wants; he listens until you lead. And when he does it well, he takes himself out of the equation so that you see yourself through him — the way an image is seen in a clear mirror that adds nothing and takes nothing away.
So if this is coaching — a companionship that grows from within, not an instruction poured from without — then what craft is it? It is the very craft of the murabbi. The murabbi tends the seed until it fruits; the coach tends what is in a person until it stands on its own. The murabbi does not pour; the coach does not pour. The murabbi sees a person as living ground, not an empty vessel; and that is exactly what the true coach sees.
Coaching, then, is a revival of the murabbi's craft, not an import from the West. This is the deepest answer to anyone who says, "Coaching is foreign to us." The point is not merely that we root a particular method in our heritage (though we do that too, in the companion piece); it is that we root the whole craft. The murabbi was always among us — our forebears knew him and honored him long before the word "coaching" was born; and the coach, done well, is the contemporary murabbi, reviving an ancient role with the tools of today.
A Word of Reverence
And here I must pause to draw a line — out of honor for tarbiya itself, not to diminish it.
I do not claim that coaching stands in for tarbiya in all its breadth — far be it from me. Tarbiya is wider, deeper, and more sacred than to be shrunk into a handful of sessions: a father's raising of his child, a teacher's shaping of his student, a nation's cultivation of its children in values and faith — all of that is an ocean no single craft can bound. I say only that coaching, rightly understood, is one contemporary form of that honored craft — a branch of its tree, not the whole tree. I revive the spirit of the murabbi in the tools of today; I do not raise my tools to the rank of tarbiya in all its majesty.
The Mission of Kun, Made Into a Person Sitting Before You
And this is the very thing Kun Academy sets out to do — it is written into the heart of its vision: to revive tarbiya as an art for cultivating the human being from within.
This is not a phrase we use to decorate our pages; it is the mission we breathe. And when you sit before a coach trained with us, you are not sitting before an expert who prescribes your solutions; you are sitting before a contemporary murabbi: one who pours nothing into you, but listens, accompanies, and wakes what God placed in you all along. In that moment, Kun's mission is no longer a line in a document; it has become a person sitting across from you, reviving in you an ancient craft with the tools of the present.
And Which Contemporary Murabbi? The Somatic-Thinking Coach
Then one last question remains: which coach is it that carries the murabbi's craft? For not everyone who calls himself a coach revives this role; many slip into instruction precisely where they imagine they are accompanying.
The one who truly carries this craft is the Somatic Thinking coach — the one who has learned to listen, in the very moment, to the felt bodily signal, and to the partnership of body and self (not the rūḥ, the spirit; the spirit is of my Lord's command, a secret we are given no power over, and Somatic Thinking works with the self — what we can know and train). He does not stop at listening to the words; he listens to the body as a partner that helps shape the self, and so he reads what is not said. And by this fine-tuned listening he tends what is in a person until it stands on its own — and that is the very heart of the murabbi's craft, in its bodily, felt form.
And so the two inheritances meet: the inheritance of the method (the wisdom of body and self, rooted by Prophetic guidance and given its medical form by al-Balkhi, as in the companion piece), and the inheritance of the craft (the role of the murabbi, which I revive here). Two roads from the roots, meeting in the Somatic Thinking coach: the contemporary murabbi.
So, What Is Coaching, Then?
It is a revival. Not a foreign arrival, but a contemporary form of an honored craft our heritage has known from of old: the craft of the murabbi, who grows a person from within rather than pouring into them from without. And what I do: I revive this craft with the tools of today, and make it trainable for the coach of this age — for the contemporary murabbi, who reads the felt bodily signal and listens to the partnership of body and self.
For I am not installing anything in you, nor importing a craft to you; I am waking a role that was among us all along. And what sets the heart at ease is that the roots of this craft are no stranger to our heritage — they are at the very heart of it; you stand not before a foreign arrival, but before an inheritance returned to its own people.
When you're ready, the door is open.
Where to next?
- Read on: Somatic Thinking — Reviving the Wisdom of Body and Self · where you'll find the inheritance of the method (al-Balkhi and Prophetic guidance) as companion to the inheritance of the craft →
- Experience it: book a session →
- Become the coach: Somatic Thinking Coaching Education (STCE) →
Verse sourcing: "and say: My Lord, have mercy on them as they raised me when I was small" (Qur'an 17:24, al-Isrāʾ). (English renders the meaning; the strict Arabic apparatus carries the citation.)
Somatic Thinking was created by Samer Hassan and first set down in Coaching Presence (Dr. Tünde Erdős, Open University Press / McGraw-Hill, 2021) — a book built on Dr. Erdős's pioneering doctoral research into coaching presence.
