Sheikh Nuh Keller’s Audio Recordings
Addiction, Hawa, and the Path to Protection
A recent question raised the painful reality of addiction: a close friend had spiralled into severe drug use, leading even to psychosis. How can we help people in such situations, and what physiological and spiritual steps can we take to protect ourselves from falling into the same hole?
Addictions are tied to hawā. Whether it is drug use, pornography, or another form of addiction, the pattern is often the same: the person keeps needing more and more to experience the same thrill. Over time, the addiction escalates, becoming more extreme, more destructive, and more damaging to the person’s mind, body, and soul.
Waswasa, Dopamine, and the Battle for the Mind
A question was raised about persistent waswasa in matters of deen. The person was not doubting Allah, subḥānahu wa taʿālā, or the truth of Islam, and was actively studying the deen with certainty. Yet certain thoughts continued to lay siege to the mind, raising the question: what is the best way to combat them?
One important point to consider is the way the brain’s pleasure centre, the nucleus accumbens, can reset its threshold based on the last major dopamine spike. The higher the spike, the more the brain begins to seek an equal or greater stimulus to experience the same level of pleasure. This is part of the destructive nature of pornography: over time, it often has to become more extreme to produce the same effect.
The same pattern can be seen in smartphones and social media. These platforms are designed to constantly intensify stimulation, with each software and hardware update competing for more of the young mind’s attention and pleasure response. The real world, real conversations, and ordinary human interactions cannot keep pace with this artificial level of stimulation. As a result, the threshold for pleasure and engagement among many young people is becoming increasingly incompatible with what real life can offer, leading to deep frustration, instability, and rage.
When Doubt Becomes a Façade
There are certainly people who have genuine reservations or serious questions. But in some cases, when a person says, “I do not believe because of philosophical difficulties I have with certain points of Islamic doctrine,” that may simply be a façade.
Often, the real issue is not philosophy at all, but a hidden attachment to sin — whether pornography or some other addiction — pulling the person toward Shaytann. The philosophical language may sound convincing to others, but it can conceal the deeper reality: maʿsiya, disobedience to Allah, subhanahu wa taʿala.
A person in that state has to turn themselves around, confront the real source of the problem, and fear Allah, subhanahu wa taʿala, who created them.
Marriage, Pornography, and the Crisis of Sexual Frustration
A question was raised about young men dealing with sexual frustration in the West. The Sunnah for someone who has a genuine need to marry is to get married, and to take all possible lawful means to make that happen.
At the same time, there are new and serious problems affecting marriage today. One of them is the widespread use of pornography among men, especially in societies where young men are made to wait too long before marriage. Pornography becomes increasingly destructive because, over time, it often has to become more extreme in order to remain stimulating. Eventually, a person may become so distorted by it that they are no longer interested in a real, flesh-and-blood woman, or may even become physically dysfunctional.
This has created real difficulties for women seeking marriage as well. In some places, women hear that prospective husbands are attending clinics to repair the damage caused by pornography, and they become understandably hesitant to marry them. This is not a small issue; it is a real and growing problem.
For young men who are using pornography, the warning is simple: stop now, while the damage is still limited. It is a tremendous sin and a path that ruins a person’s desires, relationships, and future marriage.
In some societies, marriage itself has been made extremely difficult. In Egypt, for example, some families make it impossible for a man to marry until he owns an apartment, even though local wages make this very hard. As a result, men may remain unmarried for another decade or two, and by then many are already damaged by pornography, dysfunction, or disinterest in real marriage.
The guidance remains as relevant today as it was in the time of the Prophet ﷺ. For those who are unmarried, seek a real spouse of good character and marry. For those who are already married, protect your gaze and keep your desire for your wife alone. Looking everywhere else only harms you, harms your spouse, and damages the freshness and happiness of the marriage. Everything else should be left entirely.
ʿAql, Hawa, and the Danger of Addiction
In ʿAwārif al-Maʿārif, Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī speaks about the way of the Sufis and their spiritual state. His own life showed that a person could have a worldly career and still prosper in the path of taṣawwuf. He served as an ambassador to the Mongols and to other rulers of his time, and through his life he saw many things.
He was concerned to show that there are different kinds of Sufis, though they may appear similar outwardly. Some are those whom Allah selects for Himself, while others are those who repeatedly return to Him in tawbah. As Allah says, “Allah chooses for Himself whom He wills, and guides to Himself whoever turns back.”
He then explains that outward servanthood is difficult for the nafs to accept. The nafs is blind to spiritual insight; it does not see the ultimate realities, nor does it know or feel them. On one side stands hawā: the obsessions of the nafs, its frenzy, impulses, and attachments. On the other side stands the ʿaql.
The ʿaql is often translated as intelligence, but it is not merely the thinking mind. The ʿaql is that which acts for one’s true advantage. It restrains a person from what is low, sordid, and destructive — from what will harm them forever. The root meaning of the word is connected to tying or restraining, and this is what the ʿaql does: it holds a person back from frenzy, obsession, and hawā.
This is especially relevant in our time, when addictions have multiplied through the internet and the small screen. There are addictions to pornography, shopping, games, and countless other forms of distraction and compulsion. The old formula for financial success — “find something you can make for a dime, sell for a dollar, and make habit-forming” — has become the logic behind many of the addictions now being sold to people.
No one with an addiction can hope for much in this path, because addiction is precisely hawā al-nafs. It is not simply enjoying a favourite food or harmless preference. Addiction is something damaging to you, something bad for you, yet you still want to do it and go ahead with it anyway. That is also the definition of hawā: frenzy, obsession, and compulsion.
When addiction takes hold, everything else is pushed aside: spouse, children, work, responsibility. The person says, in effect, “I want to gamble. I want to drink. I want to do this,” whatever the addiction may be.
The Sufis, then, are those whose ʿaql guides them, by the help of Allah, so that they can distinguish between what benefits them forever and what merely pulls them in and destroys them.