Therapy taught us to name what we feel. But feeling is only one way of knowing what is happening inside us. Therapy has given us a lot of language for our inner world. Emotional validation. Emotion regulation. Nervous system activation. Feeling triggered. Protecting my peace. Some of this language has been incredibly useful. But I wonder if we have started using emotion to describe experiences that are actually much more complex.

Many of us were taught that loving our mothers means carrying them. Their sadness becomes our sadness. Their disappointment means we did something wrong. If they’re worried, we reassure them. If they’re hurt by a decision we make, we reconsider it. If they’re not at peace, neither are we. But there is a difference between caring about someone and carrying responsibility for their emotional world.

This paper delves into the intricate connection between self-development and spiritual evolution, focusing on transforming an individual's concept of God from authoritarian to abstract. The paper reviews the ontological and eschatological challenges Muslims encounter, offering alternate explanations that satisfy an abstract model of God. The paper also aims to propose a staged model of spiritual development that provides practical suggestions to support Muslims on their journey toward a nuanced understanding of the Divine and ultimately of themselves.

Richard Dawkins’ 2006 book, The God Delusion, is not a timeless philosophical treatise but a product of a specific historical and cultural context. It is the product of an unexamined worldview reflecting the intellectual currents of post-enlightenment Western thought, characterized by scientism, a perspective that views empirical science as the sole arbiter of truth, and a polemical stance against religious belief. The book’s central arguments, its author’s position as a Western academic, and the provocative use of the term “delusion” invite critical scrutiny through post-Enlightenment, post-colonial, and contemporary Islamic perspectives. Rather than offering a universal critique of theism, Dawkins’ work emerges from a narrowly defined epistemological and sociopolitical context, and its claims must be assessed accordingly.

The mind-body problem has confounded the theological scholarly and scientific communities alike for many centuries. The Western perspective has traditionally hinged upon two ontological positions: dualism and monism. Dualism divides the world into physical and non-physical entities and separates the mind and soul from the physical brain in the role of human cognition. Monism, on the other hand, believes in the interconnectedness of everything, and what the dualists maintain as a distinct mind or soul is simply part of the body….

For some, the Qur’ān is a simple book of rules and stories that is easy to understand. For others, it offers an array of complex meanings, and a multidimensional moral matrix tendering a panoply of interpretive data that provides solutions to contextually derived situations. So which is it? This essay reveals that Islamic societies and their derived Qur’ānic exegesis transitioned from a relatively high tolerance of ambiguity and plurality to a sometimes extreme intolerance. Moving from past to present, contemporary civilizations of Islam evidently witness their process of modernization as a process of annihilation of ambiguity that renders the Qur’ān inert in its semantic potential…