Awakening the fitra, one Name at a time

Who is behind Amaanatouna?

Barbara Picot was born on Réunion Island, where the world’s great faiths and cultures come together: a spiritual crossroads where everything mingles until it becomes one and the same culture. Perhaps that is where it all began: from the age of thirteen, she set out on a quest for truth, striving to tell the true from the false… in search of the One. In 2012, she embraced Islam. She does not describe that moment as a mere turning point, but as a true rebirth: a second birth that restored meaning and direction to her entire existence.

From that day on, she has never stopped learning. Years of tireless research and study, driven by a thirst for depth: a refusal to settle for the surface of things, the need to understand her Deen at its source, with rigour and sincerity.

Then her son came into the world, and with him the spark that gave birth to her books. Faced with this little being entrusted to her by Allah , one certainty became clear: before letters, before numbers, before any other lesson, to teach him who his Lord is, that very Lord she herself had spent so many years seeking to find again.

It is from that conviction that her books were born, written with a mother’s heart and a researcher’s rigour, to pass on to children what matters most: the knowledge of Allah , with gentleness, simplicity and depth.

Amaanatouna, أمانتنا, “our trust”: what is entrusted to us that is smallest, most fragile and most precious. It is the publishing house she founded in Sharjah to carry these books.