Navigating the mental health landscape: seeking healing with Islamic values
Mental health
The growing conversation around trauma, healing, therapy, and where it sits within Islamic practice deserves a nuanced and careful discussion. Across Muslim spaces today, there’s a noticeable rise in both the uptake of secular therapy and a reactionary rejection of it, often due to perceptions that it is unscientific, overly focused on victimhood, or incompatible with Islamic values.
Some view therapy as a sign of weakness or a lack of resilience, while others embrace it without much discernment. So where do we stand?
How can we, as Muslims, navigate the mental health landscape in a way that honours both our faith and our emotional wellbeing? This is a sensitive subject, and the tone, framing, and implications of how we approach it can either uplift or alienate those quietly suffering or actively seeking healing. It requires humility, honesty, and care. The following thirteen reflections are offered to help guide us through this complex space with greater integrity, balance, and compassion. With that in mind, let’s begin:
1. Tone and polemicism
Many conversations around therapy swing too far to one side, either in harsh dismissal or uncritical acceptance. Some critiques take on a combative, “debunking” tone, creating a false dichotomy where therapy is seen as pseudoscience, while Islamic tradition is presented as the only source of truth and healing.
- Therapy = Pseudoscience and Lack of Resilience
- Islamic Framework = Truth and Faith
But this binary thinking obscures the possibility of meaningful integration. A more helpful approach is to explore how Islamic tradition and psychology can work together, drawing on prophetic wisdom and ethical counselling practices to inform a therapeutic model that upholds both spiritual and psychological integrity.
2. Overgeneralisation of therapy
There’s a tendency in our communities to treat individual books, theories, or therapists as if they represent the entire field of therapy. For example, popular texts on Freudian may be deeply influential, but he alone does not define every therapeutic practice.
Many therapists operate within a wide range of modalities, draw from various approaches, and often consult clinical supervisors to improve their work. Conflating an entire discipline with one viewpoint limits our understanding and prevents us from seeing the depth and flexibility that therapy can offer.
3. Misuse and oversimplification
It is a mistake to reduce therapy to just “talking about feelings” or to see neuroscience as irrelevant to Islamic understanding. In fact, many neuroscientists affirm the core insights behind therapeutic interventions, particularly around how the brain processes fear, stress, and memory. Islam too offers a holistic model of the human being.
Classical scholars have long spoken of the dynamic interaction between the nafs (self), qalb (heart), and jism (body). The Qur’an and Prophetic tradition affirm that experiences of fear, grief, and sorrow affect both the physical and spiritual heart. Dismissing this interconnectedness is neither scientific nor Islamic.
4. Dismissal of dissociation
Dissociation is a widely recognised and empirically supported phenomenon, from wartime trauma to common coping mechanisms in everyday life. Some scholars have even pointed to examples in the Seerah that reflect trauma responses, possibly including dissociation, following events like Ta’if. Rather than viewing these experiences as un-Islamic, we can understand them as part of the emotional and physiological responses Allah has created in us. Recognising them opens doors to compassion and care.
5. Therapeutic outcomes mirror Islamic values
Therapy, when practiced ethically, does not undermine Islamic aspirations, it can actually support them. Values such as gratitude, moral agency, repentance, self-reflection, and forgiveness are frequently echoed in therapeutic goals.
Forgiveness in therapy is not framed as excusing the oppressor but as releasing the oppressed from prolonged emotional captivity. Therapy encourages self-awareness, responsibility, and transformation, it’s the same qualities Islam honours and nurtures.
6. Lack of lived experience and gender sensitivity
Healing is not just a rational act, it is emotional, spiritual, and deeply personal. Many Muslim women silently carry the weight of unresolved trauma while maintaining devout, outwardly stable lives. Yet beneath the surface, anxiety and depression often persist. In our communities, spiritual bypassing and emotional masking have become common ways of coping with pain.
We are sometimes told to simply “have sabr” or “forgive”, and while those are noble and essential goals in Islam, when they are encouraged without first acknowledging our own feelings and wounds, they can lead to unresolved guilt, inner conflict, and emotional stagnation.
True healing honours both the heart and the spirit, and that includes validating pain before transcending it. These are not abstract concerns; they are regularly encountered by clinicians working with Muslim women. A culturally and spiritually sensitive approach that integrates Islamic values has already helped many and deserves wider recognition and support.
7. Autoimmune disorders and patriarchal blindness
Certain illnesses, particularly autoimmune conditions, disproportionately affect women and are often linked to prolonged, chronic stress. This kind of gendered stress is a lived reality that too often goes unacknowledged in our communities. To ignore it is to turn a blind eye to the ways structural and social dynamics directly impact women’s physical and emotional health.
Islam is a tradition rooted in justice and mercy. If we are serious about embodying those values, we cannot overlook patterns of suffering that fall heavily on women. Nor should we ever create barriers, cultural, spiritual, or intellectual, that prevent women from accessing the help and healing they need.
8. Failure to address Islamic practices’ therapeutic parallels
Islamic rituals are deeply therapeutic. Salah, dhikr, du‘a, fasting, and reflection all promote grounding, presence, self-awareness, and surrender, qualities that parallel many goals of therapy. No one is claiming Islam “is” breathwork or mindfulness, but the internal states that both practices aim to foster are often aligned. Rather than seeing therapy as a rival to Islam, we should explore how the two can reinforce and elevate one another.
9. Therapeutic modalities aim for elevation
Good therapy doesn’t encourage victimhood or self-pity, it helps people move through pain with dignity and return to themselves with hope. It offers space to be heard, to feel seen, and to speak what has never been spoken. Therapy does not say “get over it,” but “move forward knowing that what happened matters, and so do you.” In God’s eyes, you are still worthy.
True healing must address the whole person: mind, body, and soul. Trauma left unprocessed often creates spiritual and emotional blocks. Some people may be more resilient than others, but that doesn’t mean everyone should just cope. People differ in their needs, and that’s okay. Real transformation begins when we name what happened and walk with it, rather than around it.
10. Human experience vs. clinical proof
Human behaviour isn’t always subject to hard scientific rules, and not everything meaningful can be proven in a lab. Human experience encompasses the emotional, the spiritual, the intuitive, and the unseen. Lived experience is a valid form of knowledge and evidence. Just because something isn’t easily measured or quantified doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Many clients recall forgotten or buried experiences during therapy, often triggered by a sound, a smell, or a subtle physical sensation. This is not imagination, it’s the body’s memory in motion. While science and evidence are essential, the obsession with falsifiability, an idea rooted in the hard sciences, often misses the heart of what it means to be human. How does one empirically measure love? And how different is the felt experience of love from the neurochemistry of neurotransmitters? These are not mutually exclusive realities, but they point to a deeper truth: not all that matters can be reduced to data and research papers.
11. Practical therapy works, even if it’s not perfect
No therapeutic model is flawless. But imperfection does not equal invalidation. Modalities such as EMDR and somatic therapy have helped thousands of people, including Muslims, process trauma and reclaim peace. These methods are not fixed dogmas; they’re tools, many of which are evolving. Muslim practitioners around the world are already adapting them in line with Islamic ethics and values. That is the direction we should be encouraging, growth, refinement, and service to the ummah.
12. Gendered impact and community harm
We must take care not to dismiss the need for therapy through a male-centric lens that treats emotional expression as weakness or a “woman’s thing.” In many conservative spaces, this framing silences the real and painful experiences of women.
When women are silenced, families suffer, because mothers, daughters, and wives carry emotional burdens that ripple through generations. Muslim women remain under-served in mental health care, and their healing deserves space, respect, and support. If we care about healthy communities, we must also care about emotionally healthy women.
13. Islamic superiority complex and bias
Whenever we read or share critiques of therapy, we must ask: is this a sincere exploration, or is there a vested interest in promoting a specific ideology or course? Islam is not threatened by beneficial knowledge. It teaches us to seek wisdom wherever it is found.
To dismiss therapy simply because it’s “Western” is short-sighted. What matters is whether it aligns with our values. Thoughtful integration serves the ummah far better than rejection rooted in fear or superiority. If something offers benefit and does not contradict our principles, we should welcome it. If it clashes, we reject it, but we do not need to throw away the entire framework. This is part of the prophetic Sunnah.
Final reflection
As we continue to explore the evolving mental health landscape, we must acknowledge the role of therapy without suspicion. It is not something to fear or dismiss, but to understand, refine, and align with our Islamic ethics and spiritual worldview. Therapy that is rooted in compassion, accountability, and sincere transformation can support, rather than undermine, our faith.
Healing is not one-size-fits-all, what helps one person may not help another, and that’s okay. For many, the journey toward healing is emotional, physical, and spiritual, and it often takes time. Islam calls us to resilience, yes, but also to truth, compassion, justice, and care for the most vulnerable.
Scholars such as Dr Abdallah Rothman, Dr Rania Awaad, and Dr Malik Badri have laid important foundations for engaging therapy through an Islamic lens with wisdom and integrity, without discrediting the entire field. The Prophet ﷺ said,
“Wisdom is the lost property of the believer. Wherever they find it, they are most deserving of it.” [Tirmidhi]
As Muslims, we are taught to seek benefit wherever it may be found. We do not reject insight simply because it originates outside our tradition, nor do we dismiss a framework in its entirety because parts of it may conflict with our values. With discernment and sincerity, we take what aligns, and where there are contradictions, we part ways, while still honouring the good. Let us continue to build bridges, not barriers, so that healing remains accessible, dignified, and rooted in both faith and compassion.
Abu Shama and Ayesha Ahmad (Integrative Psychotherapist and Arts in Health Practitioner)