Because here is the harder truth beneath it. Your lens colours everything. The Allah you are relating to in your most private moments of prayer and shame and desperate du’a may not be Allah as He truly is. It may be a projection, assembled from every early experience of love that came with conditions attached, every caregiver who withdrew, every relationship that taught you that you had to earn your place. You are not seeing Him clearly. You are seeing Him through the accumulated weight of your relational history.

And that is not a character flaw, it’s just how humans are built.

One of my clients grew up in a home where he was consistently belittled. By caregivers, by siblings. The message, repeated in a hundred small ways across a childhood, was that he was too much and never enough at the same time.

In adult relationships, the pattern looks like this: he tolerates significant mistreatment, not because he lacks self-awareness, but because the fear of abandonment overrides everything else. So he gives more, works harder and makes himself indispensable. The logic underneath it, even if he’d never articulate it this way, is that love has to be continuously earned or it disappears.

When we explored his relationship with Allah, the same architecture appeared.

I’ve made so many mistakes. How is He ever going to love me? How is He ever going to forgive me?

He oscillates, between moments of nearness followed by a collapse into shame. Desperate du’a followed by silence and the quiet conviction that he’s too far gone. He knows, intellectually, that Allah’s mercy is vast. He’s heard it hundreds of times but internally it holds no truth.

This is not a crisis of just theology, it’s also a crisis of the nervous system.

What Bowlby got right without knowing it

John Bowlby’s attachment theory was built on a straightforward observation: human beings develop internal working models of relationships based on their earliest experiences with caregivers. If those caregivers were consistent, responsive and safe, the model says the world is basically trustworthy and I am worthy of care. If they were inconsistent, critical or frightening, the model says something far more complicated.

What Bowlby didn’t frame explicitly, but what later researchers did, is that these internal working models don’t stay limited to human relationships. They extend to how we relate to any significant attachment figure. Including Allah.

Lee Kirkpatrick’s looked at attachment with God and what he found is that people’s God images map onto their attachment styles in ways that are often more revealing than their stated theology. Anxiously attached individuals relate to Allah with the same hypervigilance they bring to human relationships: constantly seeking reassurance, interpreting silence as rejection, unable to tolerate the ambiguity of unanswered du’a. Avoidantly attached individuals tend toward a distant, transactional relationship with the divine, intellectually affirming God’s existence while keeping emotional distance.

The person in front of me knows the ayaat, he can quote them. But knowing and feeling are processed in different parts of the brain, and when early relational trauma has wired the nervous system for threat detection, theological knowledge often can’t get downstream to where it needs to go.

This is what the hadith is really pointing at. Your perception of Allah is not a neutral read of divine reality. It is filtered through every attachment wound you carry. The servant who thinks Allah is perpetually disappointed in them is not misreading scripture. They are reading it through a nervous system that was taught, very early, that love is conditional and forgiveness has a limit.

The theology we were handed

This is where I want to be specific, because the problem is not only psychological. It is also cultural.

In many South Asian Muslim households, and in many Muslim communities more broadly, the dominant theological transmission is fear-based. As children, we were taught about Allah primarily through prohibition and consequence. This is haram. Don’t do that. Allah is going to be angry. He is watching you, and when you step out of line, there will be a reckoning.

There is a place for taqwa in Islamic education. Fear of Allah, rightly understood, is a form of awareness and reverence. But when that is the primary and often only register through which a child learns who Allah is, something becomes distorted. The child doesn’t develop a relationship with Al-Wadud, Al-Rahman, Al-Rahim. They develop a relationship with a God who is primarily a source of threat.

And then we wonder why so many Muslims arrive at adulthood with a nervous system that treats the prayer mat as a site of anxiety rather than rest.

Had we been raised with tarbiyah that nurtured a different knowing, one that said Allah is loving and He genuinely wants good for you, that His tests do not negate His love, that closer than your jugular vein is not a metaphor for surveillance but for intimacy, that He loves you more than a mother loves her child, the internal working model would look entirely different.

The learning that matters here is not more fiqh or more halaqa attendance. It is a relearning. A deliberate return to who Allah actually is, stripped of the projections, the cultural overlays and the wounds that got grafted onto Him by caregivers who were themselves afraid.

The body is not separate from iman

We have also inherited a tendency to treat spiritual struggle as a matter of will. You don’t trust Allah enough? Try harder. Make more du’a. Push through. And there is something real in that counsel. But it becomes harmful when applied to someone whose capacity to feel safe is itself impaired.

The autonomic nervous system doesn’t care about your aqeedah. When you have grown up in an environment of emotional unpredictability, the nervous system learns a specific job: stay alert. Scan. Don’t relax, because relaxation is when things go wrong. That wiring doesn’t switch off when you enter the prayer hall.

Tawakkul is typically taught as a volitional act. A choice. And at a certain level of spiritual maturity, it may well be. But for someone whose baseline is chronic low-level activation, whose body reads safety as a precursor to danger, the instruction to just trust is like telling someone with a broken leg to just walk. The mechanism for it isn’t functional yet.

Tazkiyyah as the original regulation practice

The Islamic tradition has always known that the nafs requires sustained, embodied work. Tazkiyyah, the purification of the soul, is not an intellectual exercise. It is a practice. Muraqaba involves sustained present-moment awareness of being witnessed by Allah, which maps closely onto what we now call mindfulness-based interoception. Dhikr, when done with attention rather than rote repetition, regulates breath and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. The physical postures of salah, the prostration, the rhythm, the repetition, are not incidental. They are bottom-up interventions on a body that carries whatever the mind hasn’t yet processed.

Ibn Al-Qayyim wrote about the heart’s capacity for health and disease in ways that map with what contemporary neuroscience would call dysregulation. Al-Balkhi described what we would now recognise as cognitive and somatic approaches to psychological distress. The framework was always there, we lost the translation.

Tazkiyyah and nervous system regulation are not parallel tracks. They are, in many cases, the same track described in different languages.

The Prophet ﷺ who had every reason not to trust

The Prophet ﷺ was orphaned before he could form conscious memory of his father. He lost his mother at six. He was passed between caregivers. By every framework we have for adverse childhood experiences, his early life contained the raw material for profound relational wounding.

And yet he became the most emotionally secure and spiritually connected human being in recorded history. A man who wept with the grieving, sat with the suffering and maintained tawakkul through siege and exile and loss. A man whose relationship with Allah was characterised not by anxious striving but by settled trust.

Secure attachment is not determined solely by what happened to you. It is shaped by the quality of repair, by the presence of even one consistent loving relationship and by a renegotiation of the internal working model across time. The Prophet’s ﷺ life demonstrates that the wound does not have the final word on the pattern.

Where the hope actually lives

So where does that leave us?

Two things are true simultaneously, and both of them matter.

The first is neuroplasticity. The brain is not fixed. The patterns laid down in childhood, however deeply grooved, are not permanent. With sustained relational experience, therapeutic work and deliberate practice, the nervous system can learn new things. It can learn that safety is real. It can learn that love does not require performance. It can learn to regulate rather than scan.

The second is that you can relearn Allah. Not just know more about Him intellectually, but genuinely encounter Him as He is. Al-Wadud, the Most Loving. Al-Ghaffar, the Perpetual Forgiver. The One who says He loves you more than your mother loves you. The One who is closer to you than your own jugular vein, not as a watchful overseer but as an intimate presence. The One who, when you make a mistake, does not say you are not good enough. The One who does not leave.

Allah is not your caregiver. He does not have their limitations, their wounds or their conditions. He does not withdraw when you disappoint Him. He does not love you less when you struggle. The God you may have been introduced to as a child, the one waiting to punish, the one keeping a tally, was never Him. That was someone else’s fear, passed down as theology.

The work, then, is not just psychological repair. It is theological reclamation. To return to the source and read it without the distortion. To let the names land. To let the mercy be as large as it actually is.

“Indeed, in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest.” [Qur’an 13:28]

Perhaps that rest is not only spiritual. Perhaps it is also somatic. A nervous system that is, slowly, learning it is safe to stop scanning.

I’m Rebecca an MBACP-registered psychotherapist and the Founder of Ibn Sina Sanctuary, a Muslim mental health platform integrating evidence-based therapy with Islamic psychology.

If you’re interested in Sirr, our AI Islamic journalling companion built on the principles explored in this piece, the waitlist is open.

“He’s moved on, got married”, “She got the job she always wanted”, “They went to Umrah last month and came back posting about their spiritual renewal. And I’m still here, in the same wound they put me in.”

I sat with that for a bit because there’s a lot packed into it. And what I’ve noticed, doing this work, is that the part people are actually asking isn’t always the part they say out loud. Underneath “why are they fine” is usually something closer to: does Allah not see what happened to me? Am I not good enough for Him? - because from the dunya lens the people who wronged you are living a great life whilst you’re still struggling.

I want to try and answer that properly.

The person who hurt you got married, got the promotion, travelled the world, went to Umrah. None of that is evidence that Allah approved of what they did to you.

I know it doesn’t feel that way. When someone who genuinely wronged you seems to be doing fine, the nervous system starts running calculations it was never designed to run. Maybe I’m wrong about what happened, maybe I’m the problem, or maybe I’m reading this wrong and it wasn’t actually that bad.

You’re not reading it wrong. You’re just using a measuring system that was never accurate to begin with.

The dunya was never designed to be a reliable justice system. The Quran describes it as mata’ul ghurur, an enjoyment built on deception (Surah Al-Imran and Surah Al-Hadid). That’s not a throwaway phrase to comfort people. It is a direct instruction not to read worldly outcomes as moral verdicts, because they aren’t. The person with the nice marriage and the promotion and the Umrah stamp in their passport is not the person Allah is necessarily pleased with. They are the person who currently has those things.

There’s a concept in Islamic theology called istidraj. It means a gradual drawing forward. Allah sometimes allows someone who is transgressing to keep accumulating ease and comfort and worldly gain, not as reward but as rope. The Quran addresses this directly in Surah Al-Imran 3:178, where the respite given to those who wrong is described as something that allows them to grow further in their transgressions, with a humiliating punishment waiting at the end. And in Surah Al-A’raf 7:182: “We will progressively lead them toward punishment from where they do not know.”

Not forward but toward punishment, from a direction they cannot see coming.

I’m not telling you the person who hurt you is definitely heading for ruin. I have no idea, and neither do you. What I am saying is that their apparent comfort tells you nothing about the moral accounting of what they did to you. That is a completely separate ledger.

Now the Umrah thing specifically. Because this one does something different to people.

When someone who hurt you goes to the Ka’bah and comes back looking spiritually renewed, posting about transformation and duas answered, something in you can crack a little. The sacred should have some kind of filter, right? It should know. And instead it just received them.

Here’s what the scholarly tradition is clear about: Hajj and Umrah relate to what is between a person and Allah. The rights of the person they wronged, what is called haqqul ibad, operate in a completely different category and are not discharged by completing a pilgrimage. That resolution requires either genuine forgiveness from the person harmed or real restitution. Neither of those happened while they were doing tawaf.

So what you are watching when you see that Umrah post is not someone being released from what they did to you. You are watching someone engage in an act of worship in a different ledger entirely. The two things coexist. I know that’s uncomfortable. But it’s true.

And here’s the other thing worth sitting with: physical presence in Makkah guarantees nothing without genuine internal change. There is a hadith tradition about the idea that someone with a sincere intention toward Hajj who is genuinely unable to go may carry more weight before Allah than someone who went, performed the rituals, and came home entirely unchanged. The cobbler who saved thirty years to make the journey, spent the money feeding a neighbour who was starving and died never having reached Makkah, is a different kind of Hajji to the one who went for the experience and returned to the same character. Allah alone holds that accounting. But the point is: ihram is not a moral certificate - it never was.

And then there’s the question that lives underneath all of this.

Why are you still struggling?

I think this is the one that gets avoided most carefully in Muslim spaces, because the honest answer requires us to sit with something that feels uncomfortable. Sometimes people who are trying, who have been genuinely wronged, who are doing everything right, are in a harder season than the people who hurt them. That is real and many of us will relate to it.

But your suffering is not evidence that Allah has ranked you lower nor has He forgotten your name. The prophetic tradition is consistent on this: the people closest to Allah are tested most acutely. That’s not just another instagram quote, that’s the actual pattern. Ease is not the signature of divine favour, closeness is. And closeness tends to be built in difficulty in a way it simply cannot be built in comfort.

The person who gets to coast through life on the back of what they did to someone else is not being refined. They’re being given time. What they do with that time is their business before Allah. What you do with yours, with the healing, with the question of who you become on the other side of this, that is yours before Allah too.

The thing I really want you to hear, and I say this as someone who sees this pattern over and over in the room:

Recovery that depends on watching the person who hurt you suffer first is not recovery. It’s still captivity. Different lock, same cell.

I see it clinically. People suspended in a particular kind of waiting, tracking someone else’s life, needing the evidence that justice happened before they allow themselves to feel okay. And the evidence comes in the wrong shape or not at all, so they stay there. Still watching. Still waiting.

You are allowed to heal while they are apparently also doing fine. You are allowed to build something real and good in your own life without their downfall as a prerequisite.

The accounting is not yours to do.

What is yours is the work of understanding what happened to you, carrying it without letting it be your whole story, and rebuilding your relationship with a God who recorded every single moment of what you went through, even in the silence, even when nothing visible was happening.

He saw it.

The books are open.

The dunya has never been the final word on anything - the greatest reassurance of all.

I am an MBACP-registered psychotherapist and the Founder & CEO of Ibn Sina Sanctuary, a Muslim mental health platform integrating clinical therapy with Islamic psychology.

You’ve probably done a personality quiz at some point. Maybe the 16 Personalities. Maybe the Enneagram. Maybe one of those “which Disney character are you” ones at 2am (no judgement, I’m Belle…).

And they’re fun. Sometimes even eerily accurate. But have you ever noticed that none of them speak to the part of you that prays? The part that fasts? The part that sits on a prayer mat at night wondering why your heart feels heavy even though nothing is technically wrong?

That’s because they weren’t built for us. Don’t get me wrong, the 16 Personalities test is pretty accurate. But there’s something else and it’s been here for over a thousand years.

Your Mizaj is your temperament

The word mizaj (مزاج) comes from the Arabic root meaning “to mix” or “to blend.” In the Islamic medical tradition, it refers to your constitutional makeup. The specific combination of qualities that shapes how you think, feel, react, love, worship, eat, and burn out.

Muslim scholars didn’t invent the concept of temperament from scratch. It originated with Hippocrates, was developed by Galen, and then was taken, refined, and elevated by scholars across the Islamic world. But what those scholars did with it went far beyond anything the Greeks imagined.

Ibn Sina codified the four temperaments into a detailed clinical framework in his Canon of Medicine. He described how your temperament manifests in your physiology, your behaviour, your emotional patterns, and even your susceptibility to specific illnesses. His work shaped medicine across the Islamic world and Europe for centuries.

Al-Ghazali mapped the soul’s moral and spiritual development. He described the stages of the nafs, the diseases of the heart, and the path of purification through which a person moves closer to Allah. His framework gives temperament work its spiritual depth.

This is not pop psychology.

The four temperaments

There are four primary temperaments, each defined by a combination of two qualities:

Sanguine (الدموي). Hot and Moist. The element of Air. Warm, social, emotionally expressive. The person who walks into a room and changes its temperature. Fuelled by connection. Struggles with stillness and the fear that if they stop giving, people will stop staying.

Choleric (الصفراوي). Hot and Dry. The element of Fire. Decisive, principled, driven. The person who sees what needs to happen and moves toward it while others are still deciding. Fuelled by purpose. Struggles with patience and the belief that vulnerability is weakness.

Melancholic (السوداوي). Cold and Dry. The element of Earth. Thoughtful, precise, deeply observant. The person who notices what everyone else misses. Fuelled by meaning. Struggles with perfectionism and the fear that if people truly saw their inner world, they would not stay.

Phlegmatic (البلغمي). Cold and Moist. The element of Water. Calm, steady, quietly strong. The person others come to when the world feels too much. Fuelled by peace. Struggles with assertion and the belief that what they want does not matter enough to fight for.

Everyone carries all four. But one or two dominate. And those dominant temperaments shape everything.

This is not just about personality

Here is where mizaj parts ways with every personality quiz you’ve ever taken.

Your temperament doesn’t just tell you whether you’re introverted or extraverted. It tells you why you burn out the way you do. Why certain foods make you feel heavy and others make you feel alive. Why your nervous system responds to stress the way it does. Why your relationship with Allah feels effortless in some seasons and impossibly distant in others.

In the Unani medical tradition, your mizaj determines what you should eat to stay in balance. Scholars of the Islamic medical tradition understood the Prophet ﷺ combining melon with fresh dates as mizaj in practice, balancing the heat of one with the coolness of the other. Not random. Intentional.

Your temperament also connects to how you worship. A sanguine might thrive in community prayer and group dhikr but struggle with long periods of solitary reflection. A melancholic might find deep peace in tahajjud but feel drained by large gatherings. Neither is better. Both are valid. But knowing your mizaj means you can stop forcing yourself into a mould that was never designed for your constitution.

Why it matters now

Most of the mental health tools available to us were built in a Western secular framework. They’re useful. But they’re incomplete. They can tell you about your patterns but not about your constitution. They can name your wound but not point you toward your worship.

Your mizaj gives you a lens that is yours. One that connects your psychology to your body, your body to your food, your food to your faith. One that was developed by scholars who understood that the human being is not just a mind to be analysed but a soul on a journey.

And here’s the thing. Knowing your temperament is not just interesting. It’s practical. When you know your mizaj, you stop pathologising yourself. The melancholic stops thinking something is wrong with them for needing so much time alone. The sanguine stops feeling guilty for needing people. The choleric stops being confused about why no one moves at their pace. The phlegmatic stops apologising for being quiet.

You start working with your nature instead of against it. And that changes everything.

Take the assessment

We built Mizaj because this framework deserved to be accessible. Not locked away in classical Arabic texts or weekend seminars, but available to any Muslim with five minutes and a phone.

It takes five minutes. You get a personalised report that tells you your dominant and secondary temperament, which of the Khulafa ar-Rashidun mirrors your nature, which Name of Allah speaks to your temperament’s deepest need, and what to eat to bring your body back into balance.

It’s free.

Take the Mizaj assessment:

https://mizaj.space

If your results spark something deeper and you want to explore how your temperament connects to your attachment style, your relationships, and your relationship with Allah, that’s what we do. Book a consultation at ibnsinasanctuary.com or join The Secret Alignment workshop series at ibnsinasanctuary.com/suluk.

Your mizaj is not a box. It’s a mirror. And sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is let yourself be seen clearly.

You believe in qadr, you say alhamdulillah, you’ve read the ayah a hundred times. So why does your chest still tighten when you think about the thing that didn’t work out? Why are you still replaying it at 2am, turning it over, looking for the angle you missed? Why can’t you just let go?

I ask because I see this constantly. In my therapy room, in my community, in myself if I’m being honest. Someone who genuinely believes in Allah’s decree, who could give you a whole speech on tawakkul, but who is quietly, desperately fighting something that isn’t going their way. The business opportunity that keeps almost happening. The person who looks right but something keeps blocking it. The plan that makes perfect sense on paper but Allah keeps rerouting.

And instead of sitting with the redirection, we push harder. We convince ourselves that persistence is tawakkul. We tell ourselves that wanting it badly enough is evidence that it’s meant for us or we mistake our desire for a sign.

I want to talk about why we do this. Because it’s not just a faith problem. It’s also a brain problem. And understanding the difference might be the most important thing you read this year (bold claim I know).

Your Brain Was Not Designed to Accept “No”

Here’s what’s happening neurologically when you want something and can’t have it (I was shocked researching some of this).

Your brain builds a prediction map. When you set your heart on something, whether it’s a person, a career move, a life plan, your brain encodes that outcome as an expectation. It files it under “this is what’s coming.” Recent neuroscience research describes this as the brain holding two competing sources of information: what you know to be true (it hasn’t happened, the door is closed, the answer was no) and what your attachment system still expects (but it should have happened, it was supposed to be mine).

Those two streams of information are in conflict. And the brain cannot resolve that conflict quickly, it takes time and experiential feedback for your neural circuitry to update its predictions. That’s not weakness, that’s how learning works at the level of the brain.

And here’s the part that gets really uncomfortable: research shows that when you strongly desire a goal, your amygdala (the brain’s emotional processing centre) evaluates it as highly important and your brain literally starts perceiving obstacles as less significant than they actually are. Read that again. Your wanting brain actively minimises the red flags/obstacles. It downplays the things that aren’t working. It edits reality so the goal still looks achievable.

So when you say “I know it looks good and feels good but what if I’m not seeing something,” your instinct is most likely correct. You might genuinely not be seeing something. Not because you’re stupid, but because your brain’s reward circuitry is designed to keep you chasing once it locks onto a target. The dopamine system doesn’t care whether the goal is good for you. It cares that you want it. And it will keep firing “pursue, pursue, pursue” long after the evidence says stop.

This is the same mechanism behind addiction, behind trauma bonds, behind every client I’ve ever sat with who said “I know this isn’t good for me but I can’t stop.” The neuroscience of wanting is separate from the neuroscience of liking. You can want something ferociously even when the pursuit of it is making you miserable. Your brain doesn’t see the contradiction. It just sees an unfinished goal.

The Pain of “Not Yet” or “Not This” Is Neurologically Real

I think we underestimate how much it physically hurts to have something withheld from you.

A landmark fMRI study by Helen Fisher and her team at Rutgers (published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, 2010) scanned fifteen people who had recently been rejected by a partner but were still intensely in love, spending more than 85% of their waking hours thinking about the person. When they viewed photographs of the person they’d lost, three key areas of the brain activated: the ventral tegmental area (motivation and reward, the same region active during romantic love), the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex (craving and addiction), and the insular cortex and anterior cingulate (physical pain and distress).

The brain scans of people grieving an outcome they wanted shared key neural signatures with cocaine craving (I know it’s crazy). The researchers concluded that romantic love functions much like an addiction and that those coping with rejection may be fighting against a powerful survival system that underlies many addictions.

And a separate study (Eisenberger et al., 2003, published in Science - look at me referencing everything) found that the neural signature of social or emotional loss overlaps significantly with physical pain. Your brain processes a closed door and a burn through the same circuitry.

So when someone tells you to “just trust Allah and move on” and you nod but your whole body is screaming, that’s not a faith deficiency. That’s your nervous system in genuine distress. Your thinking brain (prefrontal cortex) may have accepted the qadr. Your survival brain (amygdala, reward system, pain circuitry) hasn’t caught up yet. They’re operating on completely different timelines.

The Gap Between Believing in Qadr and Being at Peace with It

Believing in qadr (iman bil-qadr) is a pillar of our faith. Every Muslim affirms it, we say it and we believe it right? But there is a difference between believing in the decree and being content with it (rida bil-qadr). The first is aqeedah. The second is a maqam, a spiritual station, that the scholars describe as one of the highest levels of the soul’s journey. We are expecting ordinary Muslims in the middle of heartbreak or disappointment to instantly arrive at a station the awliya spent decades working toward.

And when they can’t, when the alhamdulillah feels hollow and the “Allah knows best” catches in their throat, they think something is wrong with their iman. It’s not. Something is normal with their neurology. Acceptance is not a switch you flip. It is a process the brain has to walk through, and it takes time.

The Qur’an itself gives space for this.

Surah Al-Baqarah 2:216: “Perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah knows, while you do not know.”

Everyone quotes this ayah at people who are struggling. But look at the word ‘asā (perhaps) - Allah is not saying “don’t feel pain.” He is saying “your perception of what’s good and what’s bad is incomplete. I’m asking you to trust Me in the space between what you see and what I see.”

That space, between what you feel and what you trust, is where faith actually lives. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable - and that discomfort won’t kill you.

The Hole in the Boat

There’s a story we read every Friday in Surah Al-Kahf (and if you’re not reading it every Friday then consider this your reminder to give it a go). Musa travels with Khidr, a servant of Allah given knowledge that Musa didn’t have. And Khidr does three things that look objectively wrong.

He damages a boat that belongs to poor fishermen who had just given them a free ride. He takes the life of a young boy. He repairs a wall in a town whose people had refused them even food.

Musa can’t handle it. He protests each time because from where he’s standing, none of it makes sense. And at the end Khidr explains: the boat was damaged to save it from a tyrannical king who was seizing every good vessel. A defective boat was an invisible boat. The boy, had he grown, would have driven his righteous parents toward disbelief through his rebellion. And the wall was hiding a treasure that belonged to two orphans whose father had been a righteous man; had the wall collapsed, the hostile townspeople would have taken everything.

Every act of apparent destruction was an act of protection. Every “no” was a mercy wearing a disguise.

But here’s what nobody talks about, and it’s the part that changed how I think about qadr entirely.

The wisdom was revealed to Musa. Not to the people it happened to.

The fishermen whose boat was damaged? They never found out why. They just woke up one morning with a hole in their livelihood and had to keep going. The parents who lost their son? No angel visited them with an explanation. They just had to grieve. The orphans whose treasure was protected? They had no idea a stranger had saved their inheritance. They just grew up and found it one day.

These people lived through the hardest moments of their lives without explanation. Without a neat ending, without the “ah, so that’s why” moment we all keep waiting for. They just had to trust.

And that is closer to our experience than Musa’s. We are not the ones getting the behind-the-scenes tour. We are the people on the boat, staring at the hole, wondering why.

Iman is not believing in the plan. It’s believing in the Planner. Even when the plan makes no sense. Even when the boat has a hole in it that you didn’t put there and nobody is explaining why. Even when the thing you wanted, the thing that looked perfect, has been damaged by a Hand you cannot see for reasons you may never be told.

Maybe the hole is the mercy. Maybe the door that won’t open has a king behind it. Maybe you’ll find out why in this life. Maybe you won’t. But the fishermen’s boat survived. And yours will too.

What If the Closed Door Is the Mercy?

Here’s where I want to get honest with you because this is the bit I have to remind myself of, not just my clients.

Sometimes we fight for something not because it’s right for us but because our nafs has locked onto it. And the nafs is convincing. It dresses desire up as intuition. It whispers “this feels right” when what it actually means is “this feels familiar” or “this fills a gap I don’t want to look at.”

Ghazali knew that the nafs al-ammara, the commanding self, doesn’t only push you toward obviously haram things. It also fixates on halal things with an unhealthy grip. Wanting a good job is halal. Wanting marriage is halal. Wanting something to work out is halal. But being so consumed by the want that you can’t hear Allah’s redirection, that’s the nafs overpowering the aql. And when the nafs is driving, it will always tell you the obstacle is the problem rather than the destination.

What if the door isn’t opening because what’s behind it isn’t what you think? What if you’re so focused on what it looks like that you can’t see what it actually is? What if Allah, who designed your brain and knows exactly how your reward system works, is protecting you from something your dopamine-flooded prefrontal cortex has conveniently edited out?

I don’t say this to dismiss anyone’s pain. I say it because I’ve sat with too many clients who got the thing they fought for and then came back to my room six months later devastated because the thing was not what it appeared to be. The marriage that looked perfect. The opportunity that looked golden. The person who ticked every box. And when it fell apart, they finally saw what Allah was trying to show them while they were busy pushing the door.

“Perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah knows, while you do not know.”

Letting Go Is Not Giving Up.

I want to leave you with this.

Letting go of an outcome is not the same as giving up on yourself. It’s not passivity. It’s not rolling over. In the Islamic framework, it’s the opposite: it’s the active, difficult, courageous work of saying “I’ve done my part (tied my camel, made my effort, taken my means) and now I’m handing the outcome to the One who sees what I can’t.”

The brain will resist this. It will keep scanning for a way to make the thing happen. It will keep activating your reward circuitry, your craving centres, your pain pathways. That resistance is not evidence that you should keep pushing. It is evidence that your brain has formed an attachment to an outcome, and attachments take time to release.

And they do release. “Time is a healer” is what your aunty tells you at a gathering while handing you a samosa and honestly you want to throw it at her head (cause that did actually happen to me). But your aunty was accidentally citing neuroscience. The Fisher study didn’t just find that heartbreak shares neural signatures with cocaine craving. They also found that the longer the time since the loss, the less activity there was in the brain region associated with attachment. The neural grip on the thing you want literally, measurably loosens with each passing day. Not because you’ve forced yourself to stop caring. But because your brain is quietly, beneath your awareness, updating its map. Redrawing the territory. Learning that the prediction it was holding onto no longer matches reality.

It doesn’t mean the pain disappears overnight. It means the intensity of the craving reduces over time, making space for something else. For clarity. For perspective. For the moment when you look back and see that the hole in the boat was never the enemy.

And in the meantime? Sit in it with Allah. Let your salah be the container for the ache. Let your sujood be the place where you say “I don’t understand this yet, but I trust You.” Because rida, true contentment with the decree, doesn’t come from suppressing the pain. It comes from sitting in it honestly, directing it to the right Source, until the pain slowly, quietly transforms into something that looks a lot like peace.

You might not get the Musa moment. You might never see the full picture. But one day you’ll look back and notice that the boat is still floating.

And that will be enough.

I am an MBACP-registered psychotherapist and the Founder & CEO of Ibn Sina Sanctuary, a Muslim mental health platform integrating clinical therapy with Islamic psychology.

There is an ayah that most of us have heard so many times it has become almost decorative. We put it on Ramadan graphics, we screenshot it with calligraphy backgrounds. we quote it in dua requests on WhatsApp groups.

“If you are grateful, surely I will increase you.” (Ibrahim, 14:7)

And then we close the app, go back to our lives, and quietly continue catastrophising.

It happens to be one of my most beloved verses that has carried me through but I want to sit with this ayah properly. Not because gratitude is a pleasant concept, but because I think most of us are operating with a fundamental misunderstanding of why shukr is so difficult, and therefore why we fail to practise it even when we genuinely want to - the logic is there right? but why can’t we embody the gratitude?

This is not a piece about thinking positively. (I am a therapist and I have never told my clients to just think positively.) This is about what is actually happening in the brain and the nafs when we struggle to feel grateful, and what the Quranic framework of shukr is really asking of us.

Your Brain Was Not Built for Gratitude

Let me start with some uncomfortable neuroscience (I did a whole lot of reading so you won’t have to).

The human brain has what researchers call a negativity bias. It is not a glitch, it is a feature of our weird brains. From an evolutionary standpoint, the brain that noticed the single threat in a landscape of safety survived. The brain that lingered on the ten good things while the predator approached did not. So your nervous system was built to weight negative information more heavily than positive, to scan for what is wrong before registering what is right, and to remember painful experiences more vividly and for longer than pleasant ones.

Neuroscientist Rick Hanson describes it plainly: “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive experiences.” Relationship psychologist John Gottman’s (I wish I could enter this guys brain) research on couples found that it takes roughly five positive interactions to outweigh a single negative one, even in close relationships where both people are trying. The broader negativity bias literature puts the asymmetry even higher in other contexts. This is not weakness or ingratitude. This is your threat detection system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

But here is where it gets interesting. The negativity bias was adaptive when we lived in environments of genuine physical danger. It is considerably less adaptive when the “threat” is a passive aggressive comment from your in-law, a work email you are avoiding, or the dinner coming out too salty. And yet the nervous system responds to all of these with the same low-grade alarm. The stress hormones are milder, but the cognitive pattern is identical: scan for the problem, fixate on the problem, narrate the problem.

Research by psychologist Alison Ledgerwood demonstrates that our brains find a “loss frame” far stickier than a “gain frame.” Tell someone about the benefits of a treatment, then tell them it fails thirty percent of the time, and the failure framing dominates. We struggle to convert back. The negative sticks - the positive slips.

Most people walking around with a persistent sense that something is wrong, that their life is somehow lacking, that blessings do not quite outweigh the difficulties, are not ungrateful people. They are people with an unchecked negativity bias running on a loop, one that was never interrupted because nobody told them that is what was happening.

The Nafs Knows This. The Quran Named It First.

Now here is where Islamic psychology adds something that neuroscience alone cannot reach.

The Quran does not just describe the negativity bias as a cognitive tendency. It describes a specific spiritual condition: ghaflah - heedlessness, forgetfulness.

“And do not be among the heedless.” (Al-A’raf, 7:205)

Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah identified ghaflah as a primary condition of spiritual illness, a state of being so absorbed in the immediate and the surface level that we lose sight of the larger reality. When the nafs al-ammara is dominant, the lens through which we see life narrows. We see what we lack. We see what hurt us. We see what has not worked out. The blessings are there, often enormous, but ghaflah functions like a filter: it screens them out.

This is a profound observation because it refuses to frame ingratitude as simply a moral failing. Ibn al-Qayyim makes a distinction that matters enormously: ghaflah is not the same as nisyan (simple forgetfulness). Nisyan can be innocent. Ghaflah is a sustained condition, a state of the heart shaped by habits of attention, by what we repeatedly choose to dwell on, and by the degree to which we are anchored in the remembrance of Allah or drifting away from it.

Imam Ghazali describes ghaflah as the condition of someone walking through a garden, flowers blooming, light pouring through, and not seeing any of it. The blessings are present. The person is absent. And crucially, shukr in Al-Ghazali’s framework is not simply a corrective feeling. It begins with ilm, knowledge, specifically the knowledge that every blessing, including the air you are breathing right now, the fact that your eyes are working to read this, originates with Allah. You cannot feel grateful for what you do not notice, and you cannot notice what your heart is sealed against.

The person who says “I know I should be grateful, but...” is not a bad person. They are someone whose nafs and nervous system are working in concert to keep the focus on the deficit. And simply being told to be more grateful does not interrupt that pattern. It just adds guilt to the existing distress.

What Allah is offering in this ayah is something categorically different to a reminder, He is describing a law.

What the Promise Actually Means

“La’in shakartum la’azidannakum.” If you are grateful, I will surely increase you. (Ibrahim, 14:7)

The Arabic is emphatic. The lam and the nun in la’azidannakum are letters of emphasis layered on top of each other. Allah is not suggesting. He is not offering a possibility. This is a divine guarantee, and it is unconditional in one direction: your shukr will be met with increase. Full stop.

But what does “increase” mean here? This is where we often read it too narrowly, and when the expected increase does not arrive in the form we imagined (more money, fewer problems, an easier year), we quietly lose faith in the promise.

The increase in this ayah is not specified. Allah does not say He will increase your wealth, your ease, your circumstances. The increase is left open, which in Quranic grammar is a sign of expansiveness. The increase is whatever He deems right for you. It might be rizq. It might be barakah in what you already have, such that a little stretches far. It might be clarity of mind during a difficult period. It might be the softening of a heart that had become hard. It might be the simple gift of noticing more of what was already there.

Ibn al-Qayyim summarised shukr as encompassing all stations of faith, writing that half of iman is shukr and the other half sabr. Imam Ghazali went further: shukr is above patience, above fear, above asceticism, because all those stations are means to an end, bridges to something else, whereas shukr is a destination in itself. This is why, Ghazali argued, shukr continues forever in paradise, whereas sabr, fear and asceticism will end there, because there is nothing left to be patient about, nothing to fear, nothing to renounce. Gratitude to Allah is its own destination, not a means to somewhere else.

Ghazali adds something that sits beautifully alongside the neuroscience: the effect of a blessing recognised is visible. He used the image of an animal that grows fat on very little food. A grateful person is shakur, one who is nourished by very little, because they have learned to fully receive what is given. The recognition of a blessing deepens it. What you acknowledge, you keep. What you pass over without noticing, you lose, not because it disappears, but because it effectively does not exist for you.

Contemporary neuroscience has arrived at exactly the same conclusion from a different direction. Brain researchers have found that gratitude practice activates the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, strengthening the neural pathways associated with positive emotion. What we attend to, we amplify. The brain does not passively record reality. It constructs a version of reality based on what it is trained to notice. Gratitude, in clinical psychology, is not simply about “feeling better.” It is about retraining the attentional system to notice what it previously filtered out. And those changes, according to research by Brown and Wong at the University of Indiana, persisted in the brain months after the gratitude practice ended.

The Quran knew this. It just expressed it as a promise rather than a peer-reviewed finding.

Why ‘Just Be Grateful’ Doesn’t Work

If shukr is this powerful, why is it so difficult? And why does being told to be grateful so often make us feel worse rather than better?

A few reasons.

First, toxic positivity and genuine shukr are not the same thing, and many of us have conflated them. Toxic positivity says: ignore the pain, count your blessings, others have it worse. It is emotional bypassing dressed in spiritual clothing. It tells you that your difficulty is not real, or not real enough, or that acknowledging it is somehow ungrateful. It produces shame, not shukr.

Genuine shukr does not ask you to pretend. Prophet Ayyub (AS) is an example of both sabr and shukr under affliction, and his supplication was not “alhamdulillah, everything is fine.” He named his suffering directly to Allah. He brought it into the open. And he was honoured for it. Shukr does not require the erasure of difficulty. It requires the recognition of the Giver, even when the gift is hard to understand.

Second, we often practise shukr as a cognitive exercise rather than an embodied one. We list things we are grateful for without actually feeling them. Neuroscience is precise on this point: it is not enough to name blessings - a therapist I once had told me to name my blessings in the middle of session whilst I was verbal diarrhoeaing my life, and it did absolutely nothing for me. It was just a pretty exercise that had no benefit. So no it is not enough to just name your blessings.

Rick Hanson’s research on neuroplasticity shows that the brain needs ten to twenty seconds of actually resting in a positive experience for it to move from short-term activation to long-term structural change. We tend to note and move on. We do not stay.

Ghazali’s three dimensions of shukr map onto this almost perfectly. Shukr bi’l-qalb: gratitude in the heart, a felt recognition. Shukr bi’l-lisan: gratitude on the tongue, spoken and acknowledged. Shukr bi’l-badan: gratitude in the body and actions, how we use the blessings we have been given. These are not three separate acts. They are one complete act, and most of us stop at the second, or never even arrive at the first.

Third, and perhaps most importantly: the nafs is comparison-driven by default. The Prophet, peace be upon him, told us to look at those below us in worldly matters, not those above us (Sahih Muslim). This is not a call to complacency. It is a precise prescription for interrupting the attentional system that drives most of our ingratitude. The nafs compares upward compulsively. Social media has weaponised this tendency to a degree previous generations did not face. We measure what we lack against curated versions of what others appear to have, and the result is a chronic low-grade dissatisfaction that no amount of actual blessing can touch, because the comparison keeps shifting the goalpost - the pen ultimate reason I dislike social media.

The hadith is not telling you to stop aspiring. It is telling you to regulate where your gaze defaults. In deen, look upward: seek the people of taqwa, let their example stretch you. In dunya, look downward: let the reality of others’ situations restore the weight of your own blessings. It is one of the most psychologically intelligent prescriptions I have encountered in any tradition, and I say that as someone who has read a lot of psychology.

So What Do We Actually Do?

Understanding the biology is not enough. It needs to translate into practice.

Specificity matters more than volume. Research consistently shows that vague gratitude (”I am grateful for my family”) activates the brain far less than specific gratitude (”I am grateful for the moment this morning when my children woke up happily and did not blame me for having to go to school” - mornings are hard for us ok). The more detailed and sensory the reflection, the more it engages the emotional centres of the brain, and the more it sticks. This is why the Quran does not say “be grateful for your blessings in general.” It names them. Hearing. Sight. Intellect. The womb you came from. The water you drink. Allah brings the abstract into the specific, because the specific is where the heart can actually land.

Staying longer than you think you need to. If you name a blessing and immediately move on, the brain has not had time to encode it. Try ten seconds. Twenty. Let the recognition settle. This is what Hanson calls “taking in the good,” and it is neurologically meaningful.

Returning to dhikr as recalibration, not just habit. The antidote to ghaflah in the Islamic tradition is dhikr, remembrance. This is not merely ritualistic. Dhikr interrupts the default mode network of the brain, the system responsible for rumination and the negativity loop, and anchors attention in the present. Alhamdulillah said with presence is a completely different act to alhamdulillah said automatically. Both carry reward; only one retrains the heart. How you know your Alhamdullilah is said with presence is when you find yourself with a flat tyre and before panicking your first response is to say Alhamdulillah.

Using the body. Research out of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center has found that expressive acts of gratitude, writing, speaking aloud, physically acknowledging a blessing, produce significantly stronger neural changes than internal reflection alone. This aligns precisely with shukr bi’l-badan. The body is part of the practice. Ibn al-Qayyim wrote that a grateful person who only expresses thanks with their tongue but does nothing with their limbs is like a man given a garment who only touches it but never puts it on. It will never protect him.

And finally: do not wait to feel grateful before practising shukr. The neuroscience is clear that the feeling often follows the practice rather than preceding it. The same is true in the Islamic tradition. You build the station through action, not through waiting until you feel deserving of the blessing. Al-Harawi described the highest station of shukr as belonging to the person who has gratitude solely out of love for Allah, having reached the point of no longer recognising a difference between ease and difficulty. That station is not arrived at through feeling. It is arrived at through practice sustained over a long time.

One Last Thing

Allah said: “Very few of My servants are truly grateful.” (34:13)

I do not think that verse is meant to discourage us. I think it is a precise description of reality, delivered so that we take this seriously rather than assuming gratitude is something we already have covered because we say alhamdulillah after meals.

Shukr is a station, not a feeling. A station you build, deliberately, over time, against the grain of a brain that was wired for threat, against the pull of a culture that profits from your dissatisfaction, and against the forgetfulness of a nafs that defaults to scarcity.

But here is the thing about a divine promise. It does not require you to be perfect at shukr before the increase begins. It requires you to be sincere. To actually turn toward it. To let the recognition of one blessing, named specifically, felt for ten seconds in your chest, be the beginning.

Allah’s guarantee is not conditional on you having mastered gratitude. It is conditional on you being grateful. And grateful is something you can practise today, right now, in whatever partial and imperfect form you can manage.

“If you are grateful, surely I will increase you.”

Start there.

Let me tell you what happens in my therapy room (without breaking confidentiality ofc).

A woman in her late twenties walks into my room (okay doesn’t walk in its online so logs in?). She’s wearing hijab. She’s articulate, educated, practising. She prays five times a day. She hasn’t told a single soul what she’s about to tell me because who would understand. Her voice shakes when she says the words: “I watch porn. I can’t stop. And I think something is really wrong with me.”

She is not an anomaly. She is not broken despite what she might think. And she is far, far from alone.

When we talk about pornography addiction in the Muslim community (on the rare occasions we talk about it at all) we frame it as a young man’s problem. A weakness of male desire. Something to be solved with more prayer, an earlier marriage, a stern khutbah or an unc telling you to lower your gaze. We almost never mention women. We almost never ask what’s driving the behaviour beneath the surface. And we almost never acknowledge that this is not a moral failing - it is a neurobiological crisis wrapped in layers of unprocessed trauma, cultural shame, and spiritual disconnection.

I’ve held space for clients - men and women, who carry the weight of this struggle in silence. What I’ve seen has convinced me that our community’s approach is not just insufficient. It is actively causing harm. And I am so done with it.

It’s time we had this conversation properly. With actual science, with compassion. And with the depth our deen actually offers - if we’re brave enough to use it - which I want to believe we still are.

The Brain Under Siege: The Neuroscience behind Porn Addiction

Here is what is happening in the brain of someone who compulsively watches pornography and I need you to understand this, because it changes everything about how we approach this issue.

Pornography triggers a massive surge of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens (don’t ask me to pronounce this) the brain’s reward centre. This is the same circuitry activated by cocaine, heroin, and gambling. This isn’t metaphor. In 2014, Dr. Valerie Voon and her team at the University of Cambridge conducted brain imaging studies that showed compulsive porn users’ neural responses to sexual cues were virtually identical to those of drug addicts responding to their substance of choice. The researchers found that participants reported higher levels of wanting BUT NOT a higher levels of liking. That distinction is critical. It’s the neurological signature of addiction: your brain demands the thing even as it stops giving you pleasure.

The mechanism works in three stages. First, the binge - dopamine floods the reward centre, creating intense reinforcement. Then, tolerance - the brain releases dynorphin, which down-regulates dopamine receptors. You need more, harder, more extreme content to get the same hit. Finally, withdrawal - when the dopamine flood recedes, the extended amygdala activates, triggering anxiety, irritability, and a deep negative emotional state. The person returns to the behaviour not for pleasure, but to escape pain. Impulsive behaviour has become compulsive (remind me to write a post about trauma bonds in abusive relationships).

This is described as “hypofrontality” - measurable damage to the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s braking system. The same area that governs impulse control, judgment, and decision-making. The same area that is underdeveloped in children. The great irony of “adult entertainment” is that it may revert the brain’s wiring to a more juvenile state.

Researchers in Berlin found that higher pornography use correlated with reduced grey matter in the reward system and diminished brain activation in response to sexual images. In plain terms: the more someone watches, the less their brain responds and so they escalate. The content becomes more extreme. The sessions become longer. And all the while, the brain’s capacity to experience pleasure from normal, natural sources like intimacy with a spouse, the satisfaction of meaningful work, the sweetness of prayer, is quietly eroding.

Norman Doidge, in his book (highly recommend) on neuroplasticity, explained it this way: pornography satisfies every prerequisite for neuroplastic change. It builds new brain maps for sexual arousal that override the ones designed for real human connection. The brain literally rewires itself around the addiction.

This is not a willpower problem. This is a brain problem and until our community understands that, we will keep losing people to it.

It Is Not Just a Man’s Problem

Let me share some numbers that might surprise you because it surprised me too.

41% of American women view online pornography each year. 3% of women self-report feeling addicted, though that figure is almost certainly a vast undercount because who wants to report they have an addiction to porn? 76% of women aged 18–30 have watched pornographic material. More than 60% of adolescent girls have been exposed to pornography. One-third of all porn viewers are women. Yeah you read that right.

The shame attached to this for women and especially for Muslim women, makes honest disclosure nearly impossible. When Purify Your Gaze, a Muslim-specific recovery programme, opened its doors, the founder expected only men. He was wrong. Roughly 12% of participants were women, most of them single Muslim sisters struggling with unwanted sexual behaviours in total isolation.

The neuroscience is clear that this is not a gendered phenomenon at the level of the brain. Both men and women experience the same dopamine activation in the reward centre. Both develop the same patterns of emotional dysregulation and impaired impulse control. The differences are not neurological, they are very social. Women face compounded shame: the stigma of having “a man’s problem” layered on top of the cultural expectation that a Muslim woman should have no visible sexual self at all.

And for the women who walk into my therapy room? The shame runs so deep that some have carried this secret for a decade or more before saying it out loud for the first time.

What I See in the Therapy Room: Trauma, Hypersexualisation, and Escape

In my clinical experience, pornography addiction does not emerge from nowhere. It has roots. And the three most prominent ones I see, across gender, across age, across how “practising” someone appears to be (who tend to be the ones struggling the most) are these:

1. It is born from previous sexual trauma

This is the one almost nobody wants to talk about. But I have sat across from enough clients, men and women, to tell you that unprocessed sexual trauma is one of the most powerful drivers of compulsive pornography use. When someone is sexually violated, their brain’s stress response system becomes dysregulated. The HPA axis, the body’s central stress machinery goes haywire. And the reward system gets wired to associate sexual stimuli with both threat and relief at the same time.

So when that person later encounters pornography, it activates a uniquely powerful neurochemical cocktail: dopamine for the reward, cortisol from the trauma echo, and the temporary numbing effect that mimics what opioids do in the brain. They are not seeking pleasure. They are self-medicating. They are trying to regulate a nervous system that was damaged by someone else’s actions.

I have had to make grown men cry in sessions to help them uncover what was buried. Not because crying is the goal, but because the trauma is locked in the body, beneath years of shame and performance and silence. And until it surfaces, the addictive behaviour cannot be fully addressed because the porn was never the real problem. It was the anaesthetic.

2. They have been hypersexualised by a society that offers no escape

We tell our community to lower their gaze. And that is a powerful Qur’anic instruction. But we issue that instruction while our people are swimming in a culture that has monetised their arousal from every direction - social media algorithms, advertising, entertainment, the entire attention economy is built on sexual stimulation. Just pay attention next time you’re out, or watching tv, or on your phone, it’s everywhere.

The prefrontal cortex, the brain’s impulse control centre can only resist so many cues before it fatigues. This is not weakness. This is neuroscience. The sheer volume and intensity of sexualised content in modern life has no precedent in human history. Our brains were not designed for this level of bombardment.

And for women, there is an impossible double bind. Society sexualises them relentlessly while their community demands they have no sexual self at all. They are objectified in public and silenced in private. For some, pornography becomes the only space where their sexuality is allowed to exist, even as it harms them.

3. It is a dopamine-seeking behaviour - an escape from something unbearable

Loneliness. A difficult marriage. Academic pressure. Financial stress. Depression. Grief. The list is long and varied, but the mechanism is the same: the person is in pain, and their brain has learned that pornography provides a reliable, instant, private flood of neurochemical relief. It is the most accessible drug on earth, free, anonymous, and available in their pocket at 2am when the world is quiet and the feelings are loud.

This is dopamine-seeking as survival strategy. The brain is trying to escape something. And the tragedy is that the escape makes the underlying pain worse - the shame compounds, the isolation deepens, the spiritual connection frays which drives the person back to the behaviour in an ever-tightening cycle - I call this the loop of death.

Our brains follow patterns. It is the repatterning that is hard. And you cannot repattern a brain that does not feel safe.

What Islam Actually Offers - Beyond “Just Make Dua”

Here is what frustrates me as someone who works with the Muslim community, our deen has an extraordinarily sophisticated framework for understanding exactly this kind of struggle. But most of what gets communicated to our community reduces it to one word ‘haram’ and moves on.

Yes, pornography is haram. The scholarly consensus is unanimous and unambiguous. But that ruling was never meant to be the end of the conversation. It was meant to be the beginning. When Allah commands the believers to lower their gaze in Surah An-Nur, He is not offering a simplistic rule. He is describing a gateway to purification:

“Tell the believing men to lower their gaze and guard their private parts. That is purer for them. Indeed, Allah is Acquainted with what they do.” - Surah An-Nur, 24:30

Notice: this command is immediately followed by the same instruction addressed to women. The Qur’an does not pretend this is a male-only struggle. And the word used azka, purer, points not to punishment but to purification. To a process and a journey the soul undertakes.

This is where Islamic psychology becomes genuinely powerful, not as a replacement for clinical treatment, but as a framework that gives the struggle meaning.

The Nafs: Understanding What You’re Actually Fighting

The huuman soul contains four interrelated dimensions: the nafs (the lower self, the seat of desires), the qalb (the spiritual heart), the aql(the intellect), and the ruh (the spirit). Addiction, in this framework, is what happens when the nafs overpowers the aql, and the qalb becomes diseased.

The Qur’an itself describes three stages of the nafs that map remarkably well onto the addiction cycle:

Nafs al-ammara - the commanding self. “Indeed, the soul is a persistent enjoiner of evil” (12:53). This is the compulsive stage. The nafs demands, and the person obeys - not from desire, but from compulsion. Neuroscience would call this the hijacked reward system operating on autopilot.

Nafs al-lawwama - the self-reproaching self. This is the guilt stage, the part of the person that knows something is wrong and grieves over it. Every client who walks through my door is already here. They feel it. The pain of the contradiction between their faith and their behaviour is eating them alive.

Nafs al-mutma’inna - the tranquil self. This is the goal. Not perfection, but peace. The state where the soul is in alignment, the heart is at rest, and the person is no longer at war with themselves.

What Ghazali understood and what modern neuroscience confirms, is that you cannot simply suppress the nafs. You have to transform it. Willpower alone will not rebuild a dopamine system that has been rewired by years of compulsive use. You need new patterns. New neural pathways, new experiences of safety and connection - what we call tazkiyat al-nafs - the purification of the soul.

Ghazali wrote that sexual pleasure was created so that the believer could draw an analogy to the delights of the Afterlife. In other words, Allah placed this drive within us not as something to be ashamed of, but as a foretaste, a signpost pointing toward Paradise. He understood, centuries before any neuroscientist mapped the dopamine system, just how powerful this drive is. He did not dismiss it. He sought to understand it, channel it, and elevate it.

“Indeed, Allah loves those who are constantly repenting.” - Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:222

The word ‘tawwabin’ those who repent - is in the intensive, extreme form. It doesn’t mean those who repented once and were done. It means those who keep coming back, who fall and rise, who struggle and return. Our deen was built for this, the door of tawbah was designed for people who are caught in cycles, not for people who never stumble.

Why Our Community’s Approach Is Making It Worse

When the only message a struggling Muslim receives is “this is haram, make more dua, get married” here is what happens neurologically and psychologically:

The shame intensifies. Shame activates the amygdala - the brain’s fear centre. It floods the body with cortisol. And what does a dysregulated nervous system crave? Relief, escape, dopamine. The very thing that triggered the shame becomes the only available comfort from the shame it produces. This is why addiction thrives on secrecy and stigma. They are not deterrents, they are fuel.

A survey by Young Muslims (the largest Muslim youth organisation in North America) found that of those who viewed pornography, 70% described themselves as “regularly or very practising.” These are not people who have abandoned their faith. They are people whose faith makes the shame worse, which makes the cycle harder to break, which makes the shame worse again. It is a closed loop, and telling them to simply pray harder is like telling someone with a broken leg to just walk it off.

Muslim Census data from the UK found that 83% of British Muslims surveyed had consumed pornography at some point in their lives. Men were four times more likely to report addiction, but the data for women is almost certainly underreported because who are they going to tell?

The key to helping anyone addicted to pornography, Muslim or not, is for them to feel safe and accepted before any true healing can begin. Research shows the brain will not start the physiological healing process until the person feels safe. And our communities, with their culture of silence, judgement, and performance of piety, are often the least safe places for someone carrying this burden.

Addiction thrives on shame and isolation. The haram ruling was never meant to be a full stop. It was meant to be the start of a conversation our ummah is still too afraid to have.

The Path Forward: What Healing Actually Looks Like

If you are reading this and you recognise yourself or someone you love, I want you to know something: recovery is possible. The same neuroplasticity that allowed the brain to be rewired by addiction allows it to be rewired by healing. The brain can build new pathways. But it needs the right conditions.

It starts with safety. You need at least one person whether that be a therapist, a trusted friend, a spouse, just someone who can hold your truth without judgement. Not someone who will minimise it, not someone who will condemn you, but someone who understands that you are not your worst behaviour.

“O Allah, do not leave me to my nafs even for a blink of an eye.” Asking for help is not exposing your sins. It is answering the call of your own soul.

It requires understanding the root. Pornography is almost never the root problem. It is a symptom. In my practice, the real work begins when we ask: what are you escaping? What happened to you that your nervous system learned to seek this kind of relief? For many, the answer involves trauma that has never been witnessed, grief that has never been held, or a sense of disconnection from themselves, from others, from Allah that has festered for years.

It demands repatterning. Our brains follow patterns. The addictive neural pathway is a superhighway, it’s well-lit, well-travelled, and becomes automatic. Recovery means building new roads: new coping mechanisms, new sources of genuine dopamine (exercise, creative work, meaningful connection, acts of worship done with presence rather than guilt), new responses to the triggers that used to lead to the old behaviour. This takes time, it doesn’t happen overnight. Neuroscience suggests that significant neurological recovery begins within 60–90 days of abstinence, with continued improvement thereafter. But it is not linear, relapse is part of the process, not the end of it.

It must honour the whole person. The most effective approach I have seen and this is what we strive for at Ibn Sina Sanctuary is integrating clinical evidence-based treatment with the spiritual framework that gives a Muslim’s life its meaning. CBT for the thought patterns. Trauma-informed work for what lies beneath. And Islamic psychology for the existential and spiritual dimension that secular therapy alone cannot reach.

Because here’s what our deen understands that Western psychology often doesn’t: you are not just a brain. You are a soul. And healing the soul requires more than neuroplasticity. It requires reconnection to the One who created you, who knows what you carry who loves those who keep returning to Him.

A Word to the Women Reading This in Silence

I see you. I know you exist. I know the shame is doubled, tripled, because the community doesn’t even acknowledge that this is possible for you. I know that when you searched for help, you found forums designed for men, advice from male scholars who told you to get married, and a silence so total that you wondered if you were the only Muslim woman alive with this struggle.

You are not. Not even close.

Your pain is valid. Your struggle is real. Your desire for healing is a sign of faith, not its absence. The fact that your nafs al-lawwama, your self-reproaching soul, is crying out is proof that your heart is alive. A dead heart doesn’t grieve but yours does. That grief is your compass pointing toward recovery.

To the Community: We Must Do Better

To the imams, the scholars, the community leaders, the parents: the data is undeniable. This is not a fringe issue. It is an epidemic, one that crosses gender, age, and level of religious practice. The Young Muslims survey found 59% of Muslim youth viewed pornography.

We can no longer afford to meet this with silence, stigma, or sermons that begin and end with “it’s haram.” Our people know it’s haram. That knowledge alone is not freeing them. It is trapping them in shame cycles that neuroscience shows will only deepen the addiction.

What we need is a new conversation, one that is honest about the scale of the problem, informed by the science of how the brain works, rooted in the therapeutic depth our faith actually offers, and courageous enough to include women in the room.

The silence is killing us. Not the addiction but the silence around it.

It’s time to break it.

Resources for Recovery: The FYI Porn Addiction Toolkit · Purify Your Gaze · Khalil Center · NASEEHA Helpline · Yaqeen Institute’s “Overcoming Pornography” series · Ibn Sina Sanctuary · My Tazkiyah Programme

Every year as Ramadan approaches, I watch the same narrative take shape. People brace themselves. They talk about it like it’s an endurance test, a bleep test that we all hated in P.E but endured it. Thirty days of no food, no water, without complaining. The underlying message, whether spoken or not, is: this is about discipline. This is about willpower. This is about proving you can override your body through sheer force of spiritual grit.

And I get it. From the outside, that’s what it looks like. You’re denying yourself the most basic human needs for an entire month. Of course the dominant frame becomes one of self-control.

But I think that frame misses the entire point. And I think it’s the reason so many Muslims go through Ramadan feeling drained rather than transformed, and then wonder what went wrong. Because if you approach Ramadan as a willpower exercise, you will white-knuckle (a term I just learnt I was using wrong) your way through thirty days and arrive at Eid exhausted, relieved, and largely unchanged. I’ve seen it clinically. I’ve lived it personally, we all have. And I think the reason it happens is because we’ve misunderstood what Ramadan is actually doing to us, not to our bodies, but to our nafs.

What’s Actually Happening When You Fast

Here’s what modern psychology tells us about what happens when you remove a person’s access to their usual coping mechanisms, their routines of comfort, their go-to sources of regulation. You don’t just make them hungry. You strip back the layers between them and themselves.

Think about how most of us get through a normal day. We eat when we’re anxious. We scroll when we’re bored. We snack when we’re restless. We drink coffee to manage our energy. We reach for something, anything, the moment discomfort or sheer boredom arises. These aren’t just habits. They’re regulatory strategies. They’re the things we use to avoid sitting with what’s actually going on underneath.

Ramadan removes all of that. Not partially. Completely. For the entire daylight hours, you have nowhere to go. No substance to reach for. No quick fix. And what happens when you take away someone’s coping mechanisms without replacing them? The stuff underneath comes up. The anxiety you were eating over. The sadness you were scrolling past. The anger you were burying under busyness. It all surfaces, because there’s nothing left to push it down with.

This is not a design flaw of Ramadan. This is the design.

In clinical terms, what Ramadan creates is a sustained period of what we’d call “affect exposure.” You are being brought face to face with your own internal world, without the usual buffers - that’s if you are able to abstain from your usual buffers. And that’s not a willpower exercise. That’s a therapeutic intervention. One that was prescribed fourteen hundred years before exposure therapy had a name.

The Nafs Doesn’t Need to Be Destroyed

This is where the classical Islamic scholars were doing something extraordinary that I don’t think we appreciate enough.

Al-Balkhi (you’ll see me refer to him alot) described a model of psychological health in his Masalih al-Abdan wa al-Anfus that mapped emotional and cognitive disturbances with remarkable specificity (again I rave about this alot too). He wasn’t talking about the nafs as some vague spiritual enemy to be beaten into submission. He defined a healthy nafs - sihat al-nafs: as a state of balance, and then categorised what happens when that balance is disturbed: depression, anxiety, anger, obsession.

And here’s what strikes me about the Islamic framework: it never asks you to destroy the nafs. It asks you to know it. The Quranic categories: nafs al-ammara, nafs al-lawwama, nafs al-mutma’inna aren’t a hierarchy you climb by suppressing yourself harder. They’re stages of self-awareness. The commanding self doesn’t disappear. You just stop being unconscious to it. You start to see it operating. You develop the capacity to witness your own impulses without being enslaved by them.

That’s not willpower. That’s insight. And insight is what actually changes people.

Self awareness is the first step, the insight then allows you to make the changes.

Why Willpower Fails (and Was Always Going to)

Let me put my clinical hat on for a moment, because I think this matters.

The psychological research on willpower is fairly devastating to anyone who thinks self-control is the path to transformation. Willpower is a finite resource. It depletes, you will run out of it. The more you use it in one area, the less you have available in others. This is well-documented. It’s why people who spend all day resisting food often lose their patience by evening (we’ve all been there). It’s why the “I’ll just try harder” approach to behavioural change fails about ninety percent of the time.

If Ramadan were primarily a willpower exercise, it would follow the same trajectory. You’d start strong, deplete over the month, and end worse than you began. And for people who approach it that way, that’s often exactly what happens. They arrive at the last ten days running on fumes, snapping at their families, counting the hours until iftar, enduring rather than experiencing.

But something different happens when you shift the frame. When you stop approaching fasting as “I must not eat” and start approaching it as “what is being revealed to me now that I’ve stripped away the laters,” the entire experience changes. You’re no longer in a battle against your body. You’re in a conversation with yourself.

The hunger isn’t the obstacle. It’s the doorway - it is the thing that makes you finally slow down enough to notice what’s actually happening in your inner world. And once you notice, once you see the pattern, the compulsion, the anxiety loop, the avoidance strategy, once you actually witness it - something shifts. Not because you forced it, but because awareness itself is transformative.

Every therapist knows this. The moment a client sees their own pattern, really sees it, the pattern starts to lose its grip. You don’t have to fight what you can see clearly. That’s the whole mechanism of therapy. And it’s the whole mechanism of Ramadan, if we let it be. If we experience it as it was intended.

The Prophetic Model

If you look at how the Prophet ﷺ described fasting, he wasn’t talking about endurance. He said fasting is a shield. Not a sword. Not a weapon of self-conquest. A shield. Something protective, something that stands between you and what harms you.

And what harms you isn’t your hunger. What harms you is your heedlessness. Your autopilot. The nafs running the show while you think you’re in the driver’s seat. Fasting interrupts that. It breaks the loop. It says: you will not go through this day on automatic. You will be here, present, aware, even when it’s uncomfortable - which tends to be the hardest part.

He ﷺ also said that whoever fasts without leaving off false speech and acting upon it, Allah has no need for them to leave their food and drink. Read that carefully. The point was never the food. The food was always the mechanism for something deeper. The abstinence from eating was always in service of a greater attentiveness - to your words, your behaviour, your inner state. If you fast from food but remain asleep to everything else, you’ve missed it entirely.

And he ﷺ was the most generous in Ramadan. The most present. The most connected. Not the most depleted, not the most withdrawn, not the most “disciplined” in the way we typically mean it. He was more alive in Ramadan, not less. That doesn’t happen through willpower. That happens through presence.

What Ramadan Is Actually Training

I think what Ramadan is really doing, when we approach it correctly, is training something far more sophisticated than self-control. It’s training awareness.

You learn to notice your cravings without acting on them. That’s mindfulness. You learn to sit with discomfort without reaching for an escape (i.e your phone). That’s distress tolerance. You learn to recognise the difference between a genuine need and a habitual response. That’s emotional differentiation. You learn that you can feel hunger, fatigue, irritability, longing, and still choose how to respond. That’s emotional regulation.

These aren’t willpower skills. These are the core competencies of psychological maturity. And Ramadan builds them not through a lecture or a worksheet but through lived, embodied, daily practice for an entire month.

And then there’s the spiritual dimension that psychology alone can’t fully account for. Because when the nafs is quietened, not silenced, not suppressed, but genuinely quietened through awareness - something else becomes audible. The deeper self. The part of you that knows. The part that was always oriented toward Allah but couldn’t be heard over the noise of your impulses and distractions.

Ghazali described this process as the polishing of the heart - the heart as a mirror that becomes encrusted with the residue of heedlessness and desire, and that can only reflect divine light once it has been cleaned. You don’t add anything new in Ramadan. You remove what was covering what was always there. Only then will you reflect His divine light.

The Collective Container

There’s one more thing I want to name, because I think it’s psychologically significant and almost never talked about in this way.

Ramadan is not an individual practice. Yes, your fast is between you and Allah. But you are fasting alongside an entire ummah. Millions of people, across every timezone, entering the same container at the same time. Sharing the same hunger. Breaking bread at the same moment. Standing in prayer through the same nights.

In psychology, we know that shared experience is one of the most powerful mechanisms for healing. Group therapy works not because the therapist is brilliant but because something happens when people suffer and grow alongside each other. There’s a witnessing. A mutual holding. A sense that you are not alone in your struggle.

Ramadan does this at a civilizational scale. And it does it without anyone having to disclose their pain, share their story, or be vulnerable in public. You just fast. And in the fasting, you are held by a billion people doing the same thing, for the same reason, oriented toward the same God. Really deep that for a moment.

So What Changes If We Get This Right?

If we stop treating Ramadan as a willpower test and start approaching it as what it actually is, divinely designed psychological and spiritual intervention - EVERYTHING SHIFTS!

We stop being proud of how hard it is and start being curious about what it’s showing us. We stop performing discipline and start practising awareness. We stop arriving at Eid depleted and start arriving transformed, not because we endured, but because we actually met ourselves in there. Perhaps for the first time.

The nafs doesn’t need to be beaten. It needs to be witnessed. It needs to be brought into the light, examined with honesty, and then, not destroyed but redirected. Oriented. Turned toward its Lord.

That’s what Ramadan has always been doing. Not testing your willpower. Teaching you who you are.

And once you see yourself clearly, really clearly, you can finally begin to change. Not through force. Through understanding.

God didn’t design this month to break you.

He designed it to show you what you’re made of.

And then to show you where to take it.

The question was essentially this: if we believe God is in control, and He knows better than we do, and His plan is always superior to anything we could come up with then why not just train ourselves to stop wanting things? Why not detach from outcomes entirely? Why not become stoics?

On the surface, it’s airtight logic. If Allah’s choice is always better than mine, then me wanting a specific outcome is, by definition, wanting something worse. So the rational move would be to empty myself of desire, accept everything as it comes, and stop asking for anything. Just trust. Just be content.

It sounds spiritually advanced. It sounds clean. And it’s wrong for many reasons.

I’ve been sitting with this because I think a lot of Muslims unknowingly operate in this space. We dress up emotional suppression as tawakkul, trusting in Allah. We confuse numbness with sabr. We think the goal is to reach some elevated state where nothing affects us anymore and we call that ‘faith’. But it’s not faith. It’s dissociation. And I say that as a psychotherapist, not just as someone who is yapping on substack.

What Stoicism Actually Asks of You

Stoicism, at its core, says: detach from wanting. Train yourself not to care about outcomes. The things outside your control: health, wealth, relationships, results - aren’t really “good” or “bad.” They’re indifferent. Your only job is to manage your internal state regardless of what happens externally.

There’s wisdom in parts of that. I’m not dismissing the entire thing. But when you lay it next to Islam, the difference isn’t subtle. It’s fundamental.

Islam does not ask you to stop wanting. It asks you to redirect where you take your want.

The Design of Desire

Here’s where the psychology comes in, and where I think the real answer to this question lives.

If humans were designed for automatic contentment: wanting nothing, needing nothing, perfectly at peace with all outcomes - we would never move, heck what would be the need for us in this world. We wouldn’t build. We wouldn’t create. We wouldn’t connect. We wouldn’t grow. We’d be psychologically inert. Content, maybe. But completely static, frozen with no growth.

And Allah already has beings like that. The angels don’t desire, don’t struggle, don’t choose. They’re in perfect submission by nature. That’s their design and it’s beautiful but it’s not ours.

Allah created human beings specifically as creatures who want. Who ache. Who feel the pull of competing needs and desires. And He did that deliberately because the act of choosing to turn back to Him despite that pull is what makes the human journey meaningful. That’s the whole point of the amana, the trust we were given that the mountains refused. The mountains didn’t refuse because they were weak. They refused because they understood the weight of being a creature that has to choose.

From a developmental psychology perspective, desire is how the psyche matures. A child who never wants anything never develops agency, identity, or the capacity for real relationship. Wanting something, feeling the frustration of not having it, learning to sit in the gap between what you desire and what is, that’s how resilience is actually built. That’s how emotional regulation develops. That’s how relational depth forms.

Now map that onto the spiritual journey. Allah gives you desire not so you can have the thing. He gives it so the wanting itself becomes the site of your development. Your nafs wants something. What do you do with that? Chase it blindly? Suppress it stoically? Or bring it to Allah and hold it with open hands?

Each of those is a radically different posture. And without the desire in the first place, there’s no test. There’s no growth. There’s no becoming.

The Problem With “I Don’t Need Anything”

The person who says “I’ll just be content with whatever, I won’t ask, I won’t want” they sound like they’ve arrived somewhere spiritually. But listen to the hidden assumption underneath: I am strong enough to need nothing.

That’s not tawakkul. That’s self-sufficiency. And hidden arrogance. And self-sufficiency belongs to Allah alone as He is Al-Ghani, the One free of all need. The rest of us? We are fuqara, poor and are in need of Him. And the Sufis didn’t consider that a flaw to fix. They considered it one of the highest spiritual stations - faqr, absolute poverty before Allah. You cannot be in a state of faqr if you’ve trained yourself out of wanting. You’ve cut off the very thing that keeps you turning to Him.

And this is why Allah commands dua and not as a concession to our weakness. It’s an imperative. “Call upon Me; I will respond to you” (40:60). And in the hadith, we’re told that Allah is angry with the one who doesn’t ask Him. Think about that. The stoic position says don’t ask, don’t want, don’t need. Allah says: ask Me. Need Me. Bring it to Me. The asking isn’t a workaround for those who haven’t reached contentment yet. The asking is the worship.

Ibn Ata’illah said something I come back to constantly: if Allah opens a door of understanding for you when you make dua, know that the dua itself was the gift. Sometimes the answered prayer is the prayer. Not the outcome you wanted, the act of standing before your Lord with your need exposed. That’s the gift.

Emotional Flattening Is Not Peace

Here’s where I have to put my clinical hat on, because I see this in practice.

People who chronically train themselves to detach from outcomes don’t become serene. In therapeutic terms, what they’re actually developing is affect suppression or emotional avoidance and both are well-documented as psychologically harmful. They don’t produce peace. They produce disconnection. From yourself, from others, and painfully from God. Because you can’t have a real relationship with someone you bring nothing to.

I’ve sat across from clients who thought they’d achieved some kind of spiritual acceptance, when what they’d actually done was shut down. They stopped feeling the pain, yes but they also stopped feeling the joy, the hope, the longing, the love, the things that make you human. You can’t selectively numb. When you suppress the wanting, you suppress everything that comes with it.

Rida (will name my next child this) true contentment with Allah’s decree is not the absence of preference. It’s the presence of trust after you’ve fully felt the weight of what you want. That’s psychologically rich. That takes courage. That requires you to stay open, stay feeling, stay human and still say “I trust You.”

Stoic apatheia - the ideal of being undisturbed is psychologically thin by comparison. It asks you to arrive at peace by leaving parts of yourself behind. Islam asks you to bring all of yourself, the messy, wanting, aching, hoping parts and lay them down.

What did the Prophet ﷺ do

If there’s any doubt about whether Islam endorses emotional detachment, look at the Prophet ﷺ.

When his son Ibrahim died, he held him and wept. And he said: “The eyes weep and the heart grieves, but we do not say anything except what pleases our Lord.” That is not stoicism. That is a man fully inhabiting his grief, letting it wash through him completely and choosing, in the same breath, to submit. He didn’t suppress the feeling. He held it alongside his trust in Allah.

He made dua for his ummah with such intensity that he wept. He ﷺ wasn’t detached. He was deeply, profoundly invested but his investment was placed with Allah, not with his own ability to control the result. That’s tawakkul in action. Stoicism would say: don’t care so deeply. Islam says: care more deeply, but direct that care upward - to the divine.

So What Do We Do?

We stop confusing emotional suppression with spiritual maturity. We stop performing sabr while actually dissociating. We give ourselves permission to want things deeply, specifically, passionately and then we take those wants to Allah instead of to our own anxious planning.

The stoic says: “I need nothing.”

The Muslim says: “I need everything and I need it from You, my Lord.”

One of those sounds impressive. The other one is actually brave.

And I’ll tell you something else, that second posture? The one where you stand before Allah with your full, unedited need? That’s where healing happens. Not in the suppression. Not in the flattening. In the surrender of a heart that is still beating, still wanting, still alive.

God didn’t make you to feel nothing. He made you to feel everything and to bring it home to Him.

You’ve spent hours, maybe days, agonising over a job application. You’ve rewritten your cover letter four times. You’ve second-guessed your CV. You’ve rehearsed answers to questions nobody has asked you yet. Your stomach is tight, your jaw is clenched, and your mind is running scenarios in a loop - trying to foresee all the avenues.

Then you hit send.

And something remarkable happens. The knot loosens. Your shoulders drop. You let out a big exhale, maybe for the first time in hours. And almost instinctively, the words form: “It’s in Allah’s hands now.”

That, right there, is the moment of submission. And if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s also the moment we finally feel at peace. I talk about this moment a lot, because what if we could get there faster?

The Gap Between Effort and Surrender

Our religion has a framework for this, the answers are in our deen. The Prophet ﷺ said: “Tie your camel, then put your trust in Allah”(Tirmidhi). This hadith is often cited to encourage effort and rightly so. But I think we overlook something crucial in it. Notice the sequence. It’s not “tie your camel and keep checking the knot every five minutes.” It’s tie it then trust. The effort has a defined end point, and tawakkul (trusting in Allah) is what comes after.

The problem most of us have isn’t with the tying. It’s that we never stop tying. We keep pulling at the rope, testing it, re-tying it, convinced that if we just do a little more, we’ll finally feel safe enough to let go. But that safety never comes from the rope. It comes from the surrender.

What we’re actually doing in that anxious gap between finishing our effort and finally releasing it to Allah, is trying to play God. Not consciously and not in arrogant way. But more functionally. We’re behaving as though the outcome depends entirely on us, as though if we just think hard enough, prepare enough, control enough, we can guarantee the result.

And that is exhausting, aren’t you exhausted? I know I am. Because we were never designed to carry that weight.

The Qur’anic Blueprint

Allah tells us in Surah At-Talaq: “And whoever puts their trust in Allah, He will be enough for them” (65:3). The Arabic word here - yakfi, means to suffice, to be enough. It’s not a vague reassurance. It’s a promise that when you genuinely hand it over, you will have what you need. Not necessarily what you wanted, but what you need.

But look at what comes right before this in the same ayah: “And He provides for him from sources he could never imagine.” This is Allah telling us directly that our anxious planning, our desperate need to foresee and control every variable, it’s not just spiritually draining. It’s strategically limited. We literally cannot see what Allah can see. Our anxiety assumes a closed system where we are the only variable. Tawakkul operates in an open system where Allah is Al-Mudabbir - the One who arranges all affairs.

There’s also a profound moment in the story of Maryam (AS). She’s alone, in labour, in pain, gripping a palm tree, saying “I wish I had died before this” (19:23). She is in the absolute depths of distress. And what does Allah tell her? He doesn’t explain the plan. He doesn’t give her a five-step strategy. He says: shake the tree, and fresh dates will fall (19:25). Do the small, immediate action in front of you and let Me handle the rest.

This is submission in motion. It’s not passive resignation, but actively trusting in Him paired with minimal, focused effort.

Why We Resist: The Nafs and the Illusion of Control

So if submission brings relief and we know it does, because we’ve all felt that exhale after hitting send - why do we resist it? Why do we choose to sit in anxiety for hours or days before we finally let go?

The answer is the nafs. Specifically, the nafs’ deep attachment to control.

Imam al-Ghazali wrote extensively about this in the Ihya Ulum al-Din. He described how the nafs creates an illusion that our worry is productive, that our anxiety is somehow protecting us. It whispers: if you stop worrying, something bad will happen. Your vigilance is the only thing standing between you and disaster.

But this is a lie. And it’s one of the subtlest lies the nafs tells, because it disguises itself as responsibility. It feels like being diligent. It feels like caring. But there’s a clear line between preparation and obsession, between diligence and the refusal to trust your Lord - which is scary thought if you think about it.

Ibn al-Qayyim made a distinction that changed how I think about this. He said tawakkul is not about abandoning action - it’s about abandoning your heart’s attachment to the action as the cause. You do the work. But your heart rests with Allah, not with the work. When your heart is resting on your effort, you will never have enough of it. When your heart is resting on Allah, even small effort feels sufficient.

The Prophetic Model: Submission in Real Time

Look at the Prophet ﷺ at the Battle of Badr. He prepared. He strategised. He positioned his army. And then, in the hours before battle, he stood in prayer, weeping, hands raised, saying: “O Allah, if this small band of Muslims perishes, You will not be worshipped on this earth.”

He had done everything humanly possible. And then he handed it over completely. He didn’t pace around the camp rechecking formations. He stood before his Lord and submitted.

Or consider his hijrah to Madinah. He planned the route, hired a guide, hid in the cave with Abu Bakr (RA). These are all strategic, intelligent actions. But when the Quraysh were at the mouth of the cave and Abu Bakr (RA) whispered in fear, the Prophet ﷺ said: “Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us” (9:40). He wasn’t being reckless. He had done the work. And now his heart was somewhere else entirely - it was with Allah.

This is the model.

You plan.

You prepare.

Then you relocate your heart with Him ﷻ .

A Practical Shift: Getting to Submission Faster

If we accept that the relief comes at the point of surrender, not at the point of perfection, then the practical question becomes: how do we close the gap?

First, name what you’re doing. When you catch yourself rewriting the email for the sixth time, rehearsing a conversation that hasn’t happened, or scrolling for more information when you already have enough - pause. Ask yourself honestly: am I still preparing, or am I trying to control the outcome? If the answer is the latter, you’ve passed the point of tying the camel. You’re now just pulling at the rope.

Second, set a deliberate point of release. Before you begin any endeavour, an application, a difficult conversation, a medical appointment, decide in advance when you will hand it over. “I will do X, Y, and Z. And then I will make dua and release it.” Having a pre-set boundary prevents the nafs from endlessly moving the goalposts.

Third, practise with small things. We don’t build tawakkul only in the major crises. We build it in the traffic jam, in the delayed delivery, in the unanswered message. Every small moment of “this is not in my hands, and that’s okay” trains the heart for the bigger surrenders.

Fourth, reframe the anxiety itself. When you notice that tightness, that restless need to do more - recognise it as a signal, not from danger, but from your nafs resisting submission. The anxiety is not telling you something is wrong with your preparation. It’s telling you something is wrong with where your heart is resting. Move it.

The Deepest Truth

The word “Islam” itself comes from the root sa-la-ma - to submit, to surrender, to find peace. This is not a coincidence. The faith is telling us, in its very name, that peace and submission are the same thing. You cannot have one without the other.

Every moment you spend in anxious control is a moment you are delaying your own peace. Not because anxiety is a sin - it’s a human experience, and Allah knows we are weak. But because there is a door right in front of you, marked tawakkul, and behind it is the ease you’ve been looking for.

You don’t have to suffer all the way to the send button.

You can submit before you hit it. (I say hit, based on my example of job application - but this applies to all things in life)

“Verily, with hardship comes ease” (94:6) and sometimes, the ease comes the moment we stop pretending the hardship is ours to solve alone.

My brain is wired in a very particular way. It cares about aesthetics. It likes things to be sequential and contained. Disorder stresses it out because it’s always chaotic in there. So the usual advice to “just write and see what comes out” never worked for me. It felt chaotic, not reflective.

I still tried. I was adamant I was going to be a Louise Carmen girly with a beautiful leather-bound journal. When that didn’t stick, then my iPad. Then my laptop. Different tools, same outcome. I couldn’t be consistent, and I assumed journalling just wasn’t for me.

What I eventually realised, both personally and through training as a therapist, is that I didn’t hate journalling. I hated the version of journalling I thought I was supposed to do. I was trying to use an unstructured method with a brain that needs structure.

From a therapeutic and neuroscience perspective, journalling isn’t about self-expression. It’s about regulation.

Here’s what’s actually happening in the brain.

• When thoughts and emotions stay inside your head, the amygdala (the brain’s threat centre) stays switched on

• When the amygdala is active, you feel overwhelmed, mentally noisy, on edge, or stuck

• Nothing has to be “wrong” for this to happen. Unprocessed internal material alone is enough

When you put an experience into words, even briefly, something shifts.

• Activity moves towards the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for regulation, perspective, and decision-making

• This process is called affect labelling

• You’re not fixing the feeling. You’re reducing the brain’s threat response to it

In simple terms:

• In your head → threat stays high

• On paper → the nervous system settles

Journalling works not because it’s deep or emotional, but because it changes which part of the brain is in charge.

This is also why blank-page journalling makes things worse for some people. A blank page creates too many options. Too many options increase cognitive load, and cognitive load leads to avoidance. Every time I opened a notebook and thought, “what am I meant to write?”, my brain shut it down.

What finally changed things for me was learning that you don’t sit down to journal. You sit down to answer one prompt. That’s it. No emotional dumping, no storytelling, no trying to sound insightful.

This is how I journal now, and how I teach clients to journal.

I choose one prompt, and I write three lines only. Not a page. Not until it feels complete. Three lines, and I stop, even if I’m mid-sentence.

Prompts that actually work:

• Right now, I feel…

• The thought that keeps looping is…

• Today felt heavy because…

• My body feels…

• Something in me is resisting…

That structure matters neurologically. Unstructured journalling easily turns into rumination, which lives in the brain’s default mode network, the same loop responsible for overthinking and mental replay. Boundaries interrupt that loop. Time-limited, contained journalling lowers stress hormones and signals safety to the nervous system. My brain, and many of my clients’ brains, need that clear beginning and end.

For a long time, I didn’t know what I felt emotionally, so starting with feelings felt fake. What helped instead was starting with the body. Stress is often stored somatically rather than verbally, so this approach is usually more honest.

Body-based prompts I use:

• Where do I feel tension right now?

• What does it feel like? Tight, heavy, restless?

• If this sensation had a message, it would be…

Faith-based journalling was another barrier for me. It often came with forced gratitude and pressure to sound spiritually composed. Therapeutically, that backfires. Honesty regulates. Pretending creates internal conflict. When I integrate faith now, it’s grounded and real.

Faith-integrated prompts without the cringe:

• Something Allah carried for me today was…

• Something I’m struggling to trust Allah with right now is…

• A moment today that could have been worse, but wasn’t…

• A duʿāʾ I keep avoiding is about…

If the answer is frustration or “I don’t know”, that still counts.

I always end journalling the same way. I write one line: “Right now, I’m done with this, Alhamdullilah.” Then I close the notebook. That ending matters. It tells the nervous system that reflection is contained and doesn’t have to bleed into the rest of the day.

Looking back, I wasn’t bad at journalling. I was trying to force myself into a method that didn’t suit how my brain works. Once journalling became structured, limited, and purposeful, consistency followed naturally. Not because I became more disciplined, but because my brain finally felt safe enough to engage.

If journalling hasn’t worked for you, don’t assume it’s not for you. Assume you were never taught how to do it in a way your brain could tolerate. That’s usually the real issue.

These principles are also what sit behind the way I approach journalling in my work, including the tools I’m building. They’re for my clients, and they’re for people like me, whose brains don’t cope well with chaos, blank pages, or vague instructions.

Structure matters more than motivation. Containment matters more than depth. I don’t stick to things because I’m inspired or disciplined. I stick to things when they fit how my brain actually works. When there’s a clear start, a clear limit, and no pressure to perform or go deep before I’m ready, consistency follows. Depth isn’t something you force. It shows up slowly, once your nervous system feels safe enough to stay.

https://sirr.space

Where are these vibrations?
Who measures them?
And how does something mute and cold and dark like the universe, have any memory of what a human being intends?

It doesn’t.

Space dust doesn’t understand diddly squat. It has no mind, no consciousness, no mercy. It’s like saying sand conspired to make a beach. The universe isn’t personal; it’s obedient. It follows the laws Allah wrote into it.

Only Mind recognises intention.
Only Will responds to meaning.
And the Mind behind the universe, Allah, Al-‘Aleem, the All-Knowing, is the One who hears the whisper of every heart and conducts every affair.

So when you think the “universe” is responding to you, it’s actually Allah in His mercy allowing your du‘a, your action, and your trust to shape the outcome He already decreed.

The World Responds Because Allah Willed It To

The world isn’t random. It’s responsive but not to “vibrations.” It responds to asbab, the means Allah placed within it.

Du‘a, effort, patience, and intention, these are not mere spiritual acts; they are causal forces Allah Himself designed.

Allah could have created a world that ignored human choice. But out of His generosity, He created a system where your effort matters. Where du‘a can change qadr.

The Salaf understood this balance.

Umar ibn al-Khattab reported that the Prophet ﷺ said:

“If you were to rely upon Allah with the reliance due to Him, He would provide for you just as He provides for the birds. They go out in the morning with empty stomachs and return full.”
(Tirmidhi)

Notice - the birds leave their nests. They move. They take the means.

And Al-Ghazali narrates from Umar, may Allah be pleased with him:

“Let not one of you refrain from working for his provision, supplicating to Allah to provide, while he knows that the sky does not rain gold and silver.”

Our effort does not compete with Allah’s will; it fulfils it.

The All-Knowing Responds, Not the Universe

The Law of Attraction is attractive because it gives agency back to man. It whispers, you have power, you can control what happens.

And in a world where many feel powerless, that message feels intoxicating.

But Islam already gives us something far greater than control, it gives us relationship.

A direct line to the One who controls everything.
The One who hears intention, even before it becomes speech.
The One who invites you to ask, not because He needs your du‘a, but because He loves to respond.

Our actions are asbab, the means Allah built into His creation.
Our du‘a is the conversation that moves those means.
And His will is what ties them all together.

In Essence

The Law of Attraction centres man.
Islam centres Allah.

One says: You attract what you believe.
The other says: You receive what Allah decrees and He is as you believe Him to be.

So yes, your focus matters. Your intention matters. Your gratitude matters.
But not because the universe is listening.
Because Allah is.

Everything begins with intention. The Prophet ﷺ said, “Actions are judged by intentions.”
When your aim is pure and for the sake of Allah, He brings barakah in ways you couldn’t have planned.

Intention is not just about what you want, but why you want it. If the “why” is sincere, even a small act becomes a form of worship. When the heart is aligned with Allah’s pleasure, the path unfolds with clarity.

Reflection and Focus

In the Qur’an, Allah constantly invites us to reflect, to ponder, to notice, to pay attention. What you focus on shapes your inner world. If your heart stays fixed on fear, life begins to feel tight and heavy. But when you focus on hope, mercy and Allah’s names, you begin to experience ease, even inside hardship.

Focus in Islam is not just mental; it’s spiritual. It’s what keeps your heart anchored when the world feels unstable.

Having Good Expectations of Allah (Husn al-Dhann Billah)

Allah says in a hadith qudsi, “I am as My servant thinks of Me.” This is not about wishful thinking, it’s about trust.

When you expect good from Allah, you begin to interpret life through the lens of hope. Setbacks stop feeling like punishment and start feeling like redirection. The heart that assumes goodness from Allah will always find it, even in pain.

Gratitude and Contentment (Shukr and Rida)

“If you are grateful, I will surely increase you.” (14:7)
Gratitude in Islam is not about pretending everything is perfect. It’s about seeing the hidden mercy within imperfection.

Shukr brings increase, not because we “attract” more, but because Allah promises it. Rida takes it deeper. It’s the calm acceptance that even when you don’t understand His plan, He is still guiding you towards goodness.

Taking the Means with Trust (Asbab and Tawakkul)

Faith does not mean waiting for things to happen. It means doing your part and trusting Allah with the rest.

The Prophet ﷺ said, “Tie your camel, then trust in Allah.” That balance is where peace lives. You act, you try, you plan, but you know the outcome is already written in the most beautiful way.

Tawakkul is not giving up control; it’s knowing that control never belonged to you in the first place.

Du‘a and Dhikr as the Real Affirmations

In the self-help world, people use affirmations to speak things into existence. In Islam, we already have words that transform reality, du‘a and dhikr.

Repeating “HasbunAllahu wa ni‘mal wakeel” (Allah is sufficient for me) brings comfort to the soul. Saying “Alhamdulillah” shifts the heart. Each remembrance is not a spell but a conversation with the One who responds.

When you remember Allah, you realign your entire being with Him, that is the truest form of attraction.

Trusting the Timing (Tawakkul and Sabr)

There’s a quiet strength in letting go of when and how things happen. You do your part, and then you release it to Allah.

The believer trusts that delay is not denial, that unanswered du‘a is still heard, and that Allah’s plan unfolds with wisdom. Sabr is not passive waiting — it’s active peace.

The Law of Attraction Principles

1. Like attracts like
   Whatever energy you put out, you attract more of.

2. Focus creates reality
   What you focus on grows. Focus on fear = you feed fear. Focus on hope = you feed growth.

3. Thoughts become things
   What you think about consistently starts to shape your reality.

4. Clarity of intention
   Being specific about what you want helps bring it closer.

5. Emotional alignment
   Feeling grateful and acting as if you already have what you want attracts it faster.

6. Belief and allowing
   Believing something is possible opens the door for it to come into your life.

7. Gratitude amplifies
   The more thankful you are, the more blessings you see.

8. Inspired action
   You can’t just think it into being; you have to act on it.

9. Visualisation and affirmation
   Repeating affirmations and picturing your goals helps you stay focused.

10. Detachment and trust
    You set your intention, take action, then let go and trust the process.

Do you see now how Islam had it first?

In Essence

What many call “the Law of Attraction” is simply the reflection of truths Islam has always carried. The heart’s intention, focus, and trust shape how we walk through qadr.

The difference is this: in Islam, you don’t manifest from ego, you receive through surrender.

When you purify your niyyah, hold good expectations of Allah, live in gratitude, and take action with tawakkul, you’re already living the so-called “Law of Attraction.” Only now, it’s rooted in faith, not fantasy.

It sounds inspiring, but for many of us, it also feels incomplete. It speaks about the universe as if it has power of its own, when in truth, everything that unfolds in our lives begins and ends with Allah.

So rather than trying to fit Islamic teachings into the framework of the Law of Attraction, what if we simply recognised that these principles already exist in our faith in their purest and most grounded form?

Because what people now call “manifestation” or “energy” is really something Muslims have always understood: the heart’s state shapes how we experience Allah’s decree.

Reflection Prompts

Take a quiet moment to reflect on these questions:

1. What intention have I set that needs to be purified or redirected back to Allah?

2. How often do I reflect on Allah’s names when I feel anxious or uncertain?

3. Where in my life am I struggling to trust His timing?

4. What small blessings have I been overlooking lately?

5. What would it look like to act with tawakkul today — to do my part, then let go?

Let your answers come slowly. You don’t need to fix or control everything. Sometimes awareness itself is the beginning of alignment.

Why does the heart cling when the mind knows better?

The Psychology of Holding On

We often beat ourselves up for struggling to move on. “There wasn’t even anything there, so why am I still thinking about them?” But the truth is, your heart and nervous system don’t run on logic. They run on memory, meaning, and need.

Here’s what’s really happening beneath the surface:

1. We bond with the idea, not the reality.
   The human brain is wired for stories. Even if the relationship never had depth, your mind starts sketching out the chapters, the shared moments, the imagined future, the possibility of what could have been. You weren’t just in love with them; you were in love with the storyline. Losing it feels like someone ripped the pages out before you reached the ending.

2. Attachment doesn’t care about logic.
   Our attachment system evolved for survival. It lights up when someone offers even a glimpse of safety, belonging, or excitement. Your nervous system doesn’t stop to evaluate whether that bond is solid or fragile, it simply clings, because clinging has always meant survival. That’s why a fleeting connection can feel like a lifeline, even when you “know better.”

3. The brain hates unfinished stories.
   We’re wired to seek closure. When something ends abruptly, or before it’s had substance, the mind loops, replaying scenarios, rehearsing conversations, obsessing over “what ifs.” It’s less about missing them and more about your brain trying desperately to complete a story that was never given the chance.

4. Old wounds get reopened.
   Sometimes the hardest part isn’t losing the person, it’s what their absence stirs up inside you. The ache often comes from earlier places: the child who longed to be chosen, the teenager who wanted to be seen, the adult who just wanted to feel safe in someone’s presence. They become a mirror for those unmet needs, even if they never actually fulfilled them.

5. Letting go feels like self-betrayal.
   Part of you may resist moving on because it feels like saying, “I was wrong. My feelings weren’t real.” But here’s the truth: your feelings were real. They came from the most human, vulnerable place in you. It’s the relationship that wasn’t real and that distinction matters.

A Process for Letting Go

If this sounds familiar, here’s a step-by-step process to help you release it, not just in your mind, but in your body too.

1. Name What You’re Really Grieving

Ask yourself: What did this love represent to me? Safety? Validation? Excitement? Naming it makes the invisible clear.

2. Reality Check the Story

Write two lists:

• What was real - things they actually did or said.

• What I imagined - the qualities and future I projected.
  Laying this side by side breaks the illusion.

3. Let Your Nervous System Release

Attachment lives in the body. Try:

• Shaking out your arms and legs for 1–2 minutes.

• Pressing a pillow against your chest and pushing hard, then letting go.

• Exhaling with a long sigh.

These little practices signal to your nervous system that it’s safe to let go.

4. Create a Symbolic Goodbye

Write them a letter you’ll never send. Say everything unfiltered. Then rip it, burn it, or bury it. Rituals give the mind closure.

5. Anchor in Self-Worth

When longing hits, remind yourself:
“What I felt was real. What they offered was not. I deserve substance.”

6. Redirect the Energy

That attachment energy doesn’t vanish, it needs somewhere to go. Pour it into friendships, creative projects, or even prayer and journaling.

7. Expect Waves

Grief isn’t linear. Missing them doesn’t mean you’ve regressed, it just means your body is still releasing. Each wave gets lighter if you don’t resist it.

Final Note

Letting go of love that wasn’t real doesn’t mean your feelings weren’t. The heart doesn’t measure worth in logic, it measures in presence and meaning. You gave something genuine and that says more about you than about them.

And here’s the truth: once you release the grip on “what could have been,” you create space for love that is.

If you have found your way here, welcome.

I have wanted to create a space like this for a long time. Somewhere slower than Instagram, deeper than TikTok, and more honest than the polished versions of our lives that we share online.

I am Rebecca, a therapist, a mum, and someone who has spent years sitting with people and their stories. I have heard the quiet griefs, the secret battles, and the questions that rarely get spoken about in our community.

I started this Substack because there are conversations we need to have. The real ones that we often avoid.

The ones about why faith feels so far when we are hurting.
The ones about what burnout really looks like when you are the strong one everyone relies on.
The ones about how ADHD, anxiety, and trauma actually show up in a Muslim home.
And the ones that remind us that Islam gives us tools, not just rules, to help us heal.

This will not just be theory. I want to share what I have seen work. Reflections, journal prompts, and small things you can try that bring you back to yourself and back to Allah.

Ibn Sina, the Muslim philosopher (my counselling agency is named after), believed that healing the soul is just as important as healing the body. This space is my way of bringing that wisdom to life and making it practical for today.

I am not here to preach. I want to reflect with you, to ask the hard questions, and to share what I am learning too.

If you have ever felt like you have had to hold it all together on your own, this is for you.

What you can expect from me:
• A post or two each month
• Reflections, stories, and practical tools
• The occasional update about events or workshops if you want to go deeper

I want this to be a conversation. You can reply to these posts, share what you want me to write about, and together we can make this a space where we feel less alone.

See you in the next post,

Rebecca