Imran Hussein, a researcher and author, knew the proofs. He could argue with any atheist and win. He had spent years studying the hardest questions about existence and faith and had answers to all of them. But he was privately falling apart, and not for the first time.
The first had come in his teens — a full existential collapse, dissociation, years of searching through philosophies and religions and psychiatrists’ offices. That crisis had ended in a moment of profound grace: a du’ā in sujūd, a lifting of the head, and everything changed. The colours of the world, he says, were different when he raised his face. The pain was gone. He had found his way to Allah.
Then, years into his work in da’wah, it came back… This is the part most people do not tell. Not the before-and-after but the complicated middle. The man who found the truth, built a life around it, helped thousands of people with it — and then found himself, inexplicably, in the dark again.
What was actually happening
He spent a long time trying to understand the mechanism of anxiety — not spiritually, which he had been working on, but physiologically. What he discovered stopped him cold.
The reason anxiety persists (current psychology now understands) is not the anxious thought itself. It is the response to the thought. The fear. The adrenaline. The desperate attempt to solve, escape, push away.
Each attempt to fight the thought signals to the nervous system: this is dangerous. The nervous system believes you. It produces more symptoms. More symptoms produce more fear. The cycle tightens. The harder you pull, the more trapped you become — like a Chinese finger trap, where the exit only opens when you stop pulling, and actually push into the middle!
This is why the third wave of psychological treatment for anxiety is built on one counter-intuitive insight: the way out is not force. It is acceptance. Allow the thought to be there. Do not feed it. Do not research it. Do not try to corner it with arguments. Let it sit in the background — you can come along, but I’m getting on with things — and it slowly loses the power that keeps it alive.
He read this in several books before he recognised what he was reading.
ٱللَّهِ لَا خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحْزَنُونَ
…there will be no fear concerning them, nor will they grieve.” [1]
At least fifteen times in the Qur’ān, Allah describes the people who have no fear and no grief. And every time, the description is the same: those with firm īmān, who do good deeds, and who continuously work on themselves. That is the formula.
- Īmān.
- Good deeds.
- Self-purification.
Running underneath all three — submission. Releasing the grip. Trusting that what Allah has decreed is not your enemy.
The Qur’ān had already described the way out
As he says,
I had read all of these books. And the essence of it — the summary of all of it — was already in the Qur’ān. I just hadn’t seen it.”
When the intrusive thoughts came — the circling ones, the ones that feel like they will only stop when you find the definitive answer — he began to act in the opposite direction of what the thought was trying to produce.
Shaytān’s goal is to pull you away from Allah. So, every time he gives me a compulsive thought, I go to something that brings me closer to Allah. It backfires on him.”
This is not just a mental trick. It is theologically grounded. The Sahaba came to the Prophet ﷺ describing thoughts so disturbing they could barely name them. He did not rebuke them. He smiled. He told them that the very aversion they felt toward those thoughts — the psychological horror at having them — was a sign of īmān. Not weakness. Not failure. A sign that something in them was fighting for what was true.
The solution he gave was not to argue the thought into submission. It was to stop feeding it and to seek refuge in Allah. Name it for what it is — a whisper — and keep moving.
Practically, this means: when the spiral begins, do not start Googling. Do not try to solve it. Do something small for someone else — the neighbour you have been avoiding, the child who needs five minutes of your actual attention, the message you have been meaning to send. The action changes your neurochemistry, whether you believe it will or not! The rewiring happens through doing, not through feeling ready.
For the man who thinks Allah is angry with him
There is a version of this that is not an adolescent existential crisis or a public figure’s second wave. It is more hidden than that: eighteen months of rejection letters, a house that has gone silent, a self that has become a stranger. This is the performance of being fine — for the children, at Friday prayers, for a father whose approval has always been slightly out of reach. This is an act that costs more each week than it used to.
And somewhere underneath it all, a belief that has never been spoken aloud: this is what I deserve. Allah is angry with me. A real Muslim would not be in this position.
From his own experience, Imran would say that this belief is wrong. Not because difficulty is not real. It is real. Not because the pain is not valid. It is valid. But because the story you are telling yourself about what the difficulty means — that you are broken, that you are the problem, that there is no way back — is not coming from Allah. It is coming from the same place all those intrusive, circling, hopeless thoughts come from. And it is feeding on the same thing: your attention, your fear, your silence.
The single most powerful move available to you right now is not a theological argument. It is not a twelve-step plan. It is one decision, made tonight, to have a good opinion of Allah.
Whatever He has planned is best for me. He does not want bad for me. I am going to trust that, even though I cannot feel it yet.”
That is not being naive. That is the most structurally sound position you can take, because it removes your nervous system from a fight it cannot win and places the weight where it truly belongs — on the One who is actually carrying it.
You don’t have to carry everything alone
Imran ends with something that has nothing to do with frameworks.
He talks about the brothers around him. Men who did not necessarily know everything he was going through — but whose steadiness, whose way of handling difficulty without collapse, shaped him without either of them noticing. He learned from watching. From proximity. From the slow osmosis of being near people who were trying to be good.
We know that the believer is a mirror to another believer, and your struggle is not yours alone to carry. You do not have to tell anyone the full story tonight. But try to be somewhere, try to be with people. Let the presence do what words cannot.
Men are dying in silence that was never required of them. The Prophet ﷺ experienced grief. The Companions experienced it. Being in difficulty is not a sign that you have failed at being Muslim. It is a sign that you are human, in a test that is real, and that has a path through it.
You are not broken. What you are going through has a name. Allah’s mercy reaches here — especially here.
Hold on.
Source: Hold On / Islam21c
Notes
[1] al-Qur’ān, 10:62