The Muslim Habit of Treating Our Struggles as a Spiritual Deficit

There is a particular kind of relief that comes from finally seeing someone speak to what we have been carrying in silence.

Your favorite scholar posts a video about sexual intimacy in marriage, something you never expected him or her to address so directly, and you feel your shoulders drop a little. Or an influencer you follow online opens up about her struggle to conceive, and you sit with your phone in your hand thinking, finally, someone said it. Or maybe it happens somewhere smaller and more private than social media. You work up the courage to tell a trusted friend what you have actually been struggling with in your marriage, and instead of flinching, she nods, and tells you she has felt something similar too. For a few days afterward, you feel lighter. Something that lived only in your own head now exists in the world, spoken and witnessed by someone else.

That relief is real, and it deserves to be named as real. After years of silence around sexual health and sexual intimacy in our communities, being seen at all can feel like an enormous exhale. But somewhere along the way, many of us have started treating that exhale as the destination rather than the doorway. We feel a little better, a little less alone, and we quietly assume that this is what healing looks like. The bar for what counts as progress has dropped so low that relatability and representation have started to stand in for actual change, and most of us have never had a reason to question whether that substitution is even working.

Feeling seen is real, but it was never meant to be where things end

Think about what actually happens in your body when you watch that video or hear that friend's admission. Something loosens. You feel understood, maybe for the first time, and that feeling is powerful enough that it can be mistaken for resolution. But relief is not the same thing as repair. Being named is not the same thing as being witnessed all the way through the struggle. A single moment of recognition, however meaningful, does not undo years of fear, uncertainty, confusion, or anxiety around our sexual health, and it was never designed to.

This matters because most of us do not consciously decide that information or representation is enough. We simply stop there without noticing we have stopped. We watch the video and feel comforted, and then life moves on, the same challenge with our sexual intimacy still sitting quietly underneath everything, unexamined and untouched. We tell ourselves we are working on it because we consumed something that spoke to it. But consuming something and working through something are not the same act, even though they can feel identical in the moment.

This is not a flaw in any one person's character. It is closer to a pattern we were handed, one that shapes how we approach almost every kind of struggle in our lives as Muslims, not only our sexual health.

This is how many of us were taught to “spiritually develop” as Muslims

Dr. Zainab Kabba, in her book Knowledge, Authority, and Islamic Education in the West, names something she calls the Muslim Education Industrial Complex, a landscape where religious knowledge has increasingly become something we acquire and consume rather than something we live and embody. Her research traces how emerging adult Muslims in the West go searching for religious knowledge the way people search for almost anything else now, moving from teacher to teacher, platform to platform, always looking for the next piece of information that might finally settle something unsettled inside them. Part of what she names is how religious knowledge itself has become a kind of commodity, something individuals and organizations can package, market, and sell to a community that is genuinely hungry for it, often without much accountability to whether any of it actually changes how we live. Knowledge from an Islamic paradigm was always meant to be a means toward ethical practice, not an end in itself, yet many of us have been taught to treat the collecting of it, the classes attended, the notes taken, the courses finished, as though the collecting were the goal. Her question is worth sitting with honestly: if what we learn does not change how we actually live, what is all that acquisition really giving us in its place?

If we are honest, this pattern shows up far beyond religious knowledge in the strict sense. When something feels off in our lives, many of us were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that the answer is to go learn more. Feeling distant from God? Go take a class. Feeling lost? Find a book. Feeling ashamed of something? Listen to a lecture about it. Learning has real value, and this is not an argument against seeking knowledge. But when knowledge acquisition becomes the default response to every kind of pain, including pain that has nothing to do with what we know and everything to do with what we feel, we end up reaching for the wrong tool over and over again, and wondering why it never quite works.

Sexual health and sexual intimacy within Muslim spaces have inherited this same pattern, perhaps even more intensely than other areas, because shame tends to keep people reaching for information rather than sitting with what is actually happening inside them. If we can just understand something well enough, we tell ourselves, we will finally be free of the struggle surrounding it. This assumption sits quietly underneath almost everything currently available to Muslims looking for support with their sexual health.

What this actually looks like when we go looking for help

If you spend time looking for support around sexual health as a Muslim, what you will mostly find falls into a few familiar shapes.

A great deal of it is focused on religious rulings. What is halal, what is Sunnah, what is discouraged, what the scholars have said about a given practice. This knowledge matters and answers real questions, but it answers a different question than the one most people are actually carrying. Knowing what is permissible does not tell you why you feel disconnected from your own body, or why sexual intimacy with your spouse feels like an obligation rather than a source of closeness.

Another large portion is focused on rights and responsibilities within marriage, often aimed at couples preparing to marry. These resources are genuinely useful for the front end of a marriage, when two people are trying to understand what they owe each other and how to build a life together. But they were built for an aspect of this beginning, not for what happens years in, once disconnect has already settled into a marriage and the honest conversations have quietly stopped happening.

A third shape is strategy focused. Tips, techniques, five ways to rekindle the “spark,” and three conversations to have with your spouse this week. These resources treat the version of the problem that is visible on the surface, and surface level solutions can genuinely help for a while. But they rarely reach the disconnect underneath, the emotional wounds that made the surface problem show up in the first place, and so the same struggle tends to resurface again once the technique stops working.

A fourth shape is what we might call advocacy without a destination. Articles and research pointing out, correctly, that Muslims need more comprehensive sexual health education aligned with our faith tradition, that our communities are struggling in silence, that something needs to change. These pieces do real work by naming a problem publicly that used to only be whispered about. But naming a gap is not the same as offering somewhere for a person to actually go once they recognize themselves in what was named, and too often that is exactly where these pieces end.

And then there is a newer, more specific shape worth naming on its own. In the last several years, more coaches and educators have started addressing very particular pieces of our sexual health directly, things like painful sexual intimacy or feeling more at ease with your menstrual cycle. This work is real and it is needed, and it has almost certainly helped people who had nowhere else to turn. But by design, it tends to zoom in on one aspect of our sexual health, or one part of the story, without connecting that piece back to the entirety of the soul and a person. Someone can do meaningful work on one specific struggle and still feel like a stranger to themselves as a whole, because the piece was never held alongside everything it is actually tangled up with. Our fear, our shame, our marriage, our relationship with God, our sense of our own body as something worth witnessing rather than fixing.

There is also a sixth shape, one that shows up constantly across social media rather than in any formal program. A struggle gets named, impatience, anger, sadness, anxiety, fear, and it is met almost immediately with a definition or a historical example, an explanation of what sabr actually means, a reminder of what gratitude requires of us, a teaching on tawakkul, all offered as a way to help us think differently about what we are feeling. There is nothing wrong with these concepts themselves, and they carry real depth when they are lived rather than only explained. But offered this way, in place of actually staying with the feeling itself, they function the same way a reframe does in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and this is not a coincidence. I have written previously about how the Muslim mental health field's own obsession with CBT reflects this same pull toward the intellect over the heart, toward thinking our way to a better feeling rather than actually feeling our way there. What is happening in both cases, whether it is a therapist offering a reframe or a caption offering a definition of sabr, is spiritual bypassing. Discomfort gets skipped over rather than met, using our own tradition as the very thing that helps us skip it.

Across all six of these shapes, something worth sitting with is present. Most of what exists, in one way or another, is still operating on the same underlying belief that shaped Kabba's research. That the way forward is more knowing, whether that knowledge is a ruling, a strategy, a statistic, a technique addressed to one specific part of us, or a definition meant to help us think our way past what we feel.

We keep hoping that enough knowledge will finally fix what we feel

I am saying this plainly because it deserves to be said plainly. We think that if we just learn enough about our sexual health, our struggle with sexual health or sexual intimacy will finally lift. We think that if we just learn about our Islamic rights and responsibilities, we will stop feeling ashamed of our own bodies. We think that knowledge will be the thing that finally solves the problem, that takes away the fear, that brings our sexual desire back after it has gone quiet for months or years, that makes pleasure feel accessible again after it has felt out of reach for so long.

This is because we so often associate our struggles with sexual health, and really any struggle in our lives, with something about our relationship with God, our spirituality, and what it says about us as a person. If we are struggling, we assume it means something is spiritually wrong with us, and so we reach for the same fix we would reach for anything else we believed was spiritually wrong with us. More knowledge, more understanding, more proof to ourselves that we are still trying.

None of this is a foolish thing to believe. It is a reasonable conclusion to draw when almost everything available to us implicitly promises that learning is the path to relief. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to understand more about your own body, your own faith, or your own marriage. The problem is not the desire to learn. The problem is what we have quietly come to expect that learning will do for us, and how disappointed and confused we feel, often without naming it as disappointment, when the fear is still there after the course ends and the video stops playing.

Acquiring knowledge has never been the same as healing

Here is what is worth sitting with honestly. Your struggle - and its accompanying uncomfortable emotions - do not live in the intellect, and it was never going to be resolved by the intellect alone. You can know every ruling about sexual intimacy in marriage and still feel your body tense the moment your spouse reaches for you. You can watch every video and still feel that same old shame rise up the next time you are alone with your own thoughts. This is not because you did not learn enough, or because you found the wrong teacher, or because you need one more course. It is because fear and disconnection live somewhere that information alone cannot reach.

What actually shifts something is not more knowing. It is a different relationship to what we feel, the fear itself, the shame itself, met with compassion and curiosity instead of another attempt to think our way past it. That is a different kind of work than the work most of what currently exists is asking of us, and it is worth naming honestly rather than continuing to hope that the next book or the next video will finally be the one that does it.

Questions worth asking the next time you get pulled into this pattern

The next time you come across something that speaks to your sexual health, whether it is a video, a book, a course, or a friend's honest admission, it can help to pause and ask yourself a few honest questions before deciding what it actually did for you:

Did this help me understand something new, or did it help me feel something I had been avoiding feeling? Both matter, but they are not the same, and it helps to know which one just happened.

Am I able to sit with what came up afterward, or did I immediately reach for the next piece of content because sitting with it felt uncomfortable?

Does this resource treat the specific issue in front of me as connected to the rest of who I am, my fear, my marriage, my relationship with God, or does it treat that issue as something isolated to be fixed on its own?

And perhaps most importantly, a week from now, will anything in how I actually relate to my own body or my own fear be different, or will I simply know more than I did before?

None of this is because we haven't tried hard enough, or looked in enough places, or read enough books. In my next blog post, I want to look directly at fear itself, what it actually does to us the moment it shows up, and why it shuts down the very things we need most in order to heal: compassion and curiosity toward ourselves.

Season One: Intimacy in Marriage arrives on September 4th. You can learn more about Season One here.