He could argue with any atheist in the world and win. He knew the proofs. He had the frameworks. He had spent years helping others find their way to certainty. And yet, he was coming apart.
“I believe everything,” he told himself. “I can disprove any opposing position. So what’s going on? Why am I feeling this again?”
This is the part of the story that does not get told enough — the complicated middle, not only the dramatic before-and-after. The man who found Islam, found purpose, found a framework for living… and then found himself, years later, back in the dark, confused about how he got there and frightened it would never lift.
We spoke to Imran Hussein, a senior researcher and author at Sapience Institute, about his journey through anxiety, adolescent existential collapse, and the spiritual opening that changed everything. And then through a second crisis that knocked him sideways, precisely because it came after he thought he had figured it out.
When the questions start pressing
He was 12, maybe 13, when it began. He hadn’t yet been diagnosed with anything.
He was just a teenager in a Muslim household where Islam was present but not the centre — there in Ramadan, on Jumu’ah, in the general shape of things — but not the answer to the questions that were building inside him.
Who am I? What is this? Is any of it real?”
He describes the moment it broke open: he came home from school one day, furious about something he cannot now name. He was at a computer. It was loading slowly. And in the ordinary frustration of that ordinary moment, something gave way.
I smashed the keyboard. Punched my hands right through it. And in that very moment, everything around me shifted.”
What followed, in clinical terms, was a dissociative episode — the brain overwhelmed, shutting itself partially down as protection. In his lived experience, it was like being cut off from everything he had ever known. His room, which he knew, suddenly meant nothing. His street, which he knew, felt alien. His own face in the mirror? Familiar and completely strange at once.
It was like waking up in the Matrix. Everything around me is the same, but I don’t recognise it. Not because it’s changed. But because I have.”
He would go in and out of these states for years. And the questions that accompanied them — the existential questions about purpose, meaning, identity, death — were no longer abstract philosophical puzzles. They were his daily life. He could not escape them. The distractions that worked for everyone else — socialising, ambitions, entertainment — had stopped working for him. They were like a ceiling that the questions had punched straight through.
He saw doctors. He saw psychiatrists. He tried therapies. Some of them helped — for a while — and then the questions came back, because the questions were never the problem the psychiatrists were treating.
They were trying to treat the anxiety itself. Not the fundamental cause of my anxiety, which was these existential questions. And they couldn’t.”
The night he picked up the Qur’ān
He was maybe 19 or 20. He had been through philosophy. He had tried other religions in the way of someone genuinely searching. He had even stood outside different religious buildings and said aloud to Whoever might be listening,
…if You’re there, tell me. I need to know.”
Then one evening, at what he describes as his lowest point, he looked at a copy of the Qur’ān on the shelf. His immediate thought was dismissive — that’s the one place I haven’t looked, and it’s not going to have anything either. He opened it anyway. He landed on a commentary. It said something to this effect: just as the rays of the sun break through at the darkest moment of the night, so does guidance break through in your darkest moments.
It hit me like something very different. It was almost like: this is it. Not a rational thing. not a philosophical thing; it was just every atom of my being recognising: there is something here.”
He started reading. He started going to the masjid. Things he had previously walked past — the brothers with beards, the call to prayer — he began to see differently. Not as signs of a tribe he did not belong to, but as signs of something he was being drawn toward.
He was still struggling. Still using alcohol as a crutch in those early weeks. But something had shifted in the direction of travel.
Then came the sujūd. He was praying — still in that place of mixed feelings, of faith not yet fully settled — and he went into prostration. And he made a du’ā.
He said,
Allah, I know this is the truth. I’ve gone through this a lot. Now please remove this from me. This last bit of anxiety…
When I lifted my head, the colours of the world had changed. The feelings were gone. That anxiety was gone. Everything was different. Not physically — the same walls, the same room. But it was like the heart had begun to see.”
The second wave and what it taught him
This is where most stories end. The young man lost, now found. The darkness broken. The peace arrived. But this is not most stories!
Years later, having built a career in da’wah, having become known, having helped thousands of people… he found himself in crisis again.
I still believe everything. I can argue with any atheist. I have the arguments. So what’s going on?”
What had happened, slowly and without his noticing, was a drift. The intention behind his work had shifted — from sincerity to something more entangled with recognition, with reach, with how he was seen. The architecture of the self had been rearranged without his permission.
Knowledge isn’t enough, in and of itself. In Islam, knowledge has an objective. It has to result in something. And the best of knowledge is that which grounds you and turns you back — allows you to connect with Allah and fulfil the purpose of your life.”
He had known things. He had been able to articulate everything. And he had come unmoored anyway — because knowledge that is not lived, not breathed, not connected to a real and honest relationship with Allah, becomes a kind of brilliant scaffolding around an empty space.
This second crisis was harder to navigate than the first. The first time, the path out had come suddenly, almost as a gift. This time, the same methods did not produce the same results immediately — and he had to sit with that, to understand that some lessons cannot be shortcut.
It’s almost like Allah was teaching me: you’re not going to get it as easy every time. Because when you get things easy, you don’t appreciate them.”
The cycle no-one explained to him, until he explained it to himself
After the second wave, he did something unusual: he decided to understand what was actually happening to him. Not spiritually (he had been doing that) but physiologically. He read extensively on anxiety, on the nervous system, on CBT and its third-wave successors. He wanted to know the mechanism.
What he found, eventually, was something that stopped him cold.
In third-wave psychological treatment for anxiety — approaches like ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) — the entire therapeutic strategy is built around one counter-intuitive move. You do not fight the anxious thought. You do not research it, solve it, or push it away. You accept it. You allow it to be there. You stop giving it the reaction it feeds on.
Because the cycle works like this: the anxious thought arrives. Fear follows. Fear releases adrenaline. Adrenaline produces more symptoms. The symptoms trigger more fear. More adrenaline. The cycle tightens. And the harder you pull to get out, the tighter it gets — like a Chinese finger trap, where the exit is only found by moving toward, not away.
So the way out is not force. The way out is acceptance.
And then I thought — where have I heard this before?”
He went back to the Qur’ān. He found that at least fifteen times, the Qur’ān describes the same formula: those who have īmān, do good deeds, and work continuously on themselves — these are the ones who have no fear of what is to come and no grief over what has passed.
أَلَآ إِنَّ أَوْلِيَآءَ ٱللَّهِ لَا خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحْزَنُونَ
There will certainly be no fear for the close servants of Allah, nor will they grieve.” [1]
He says,
I had read all of these books. All of these therapies. And the summary — the essence — was already there. In the Qur’ān. I just hadn’t seen it.”
And he breaks it down simply:
Īmān — trusting, genuinely, that Allah is in control. Not performing trust. Actually relinquishing the grip.
Good deeds — not as achievement, but as movement. Doing something for someone else, even when you do not feel it, even when everything in you is pulling toward stillness and isolation. The action changes the neurochemistry, whether you believe it will or not.
Continuous self-work — not perfection, not a finished project, but persistent, gentle return. Taqwa. Purification. The ongoing practice of turning back.
And running underneath all three — submission. Islam in its deepest sense. Not fighting what you cannot control. Not fleeing what Allah has decreed. Releasing your grip on the outcome, because the outcome is not yours to hold.
What Shaytān actually wants
There is one part of this conversation that lands differently from everything else.
When the obsessive thoughts come — the intrusive ones, the ones that circle the same question endlessly, the ones that feel like they will only stop if you find the definitive answer — he has a very specific strategy.
He acts in the opposite direction.
Shaytān’s objective is to take you away from worshipping Allah. So as soon as he gives me a compulsive thought, I go to something that brings me closer to Allah. Because it is his objective to take me away — so it’s backfiring. He’s going to think: this is not working. Every time I give him a thought, he gets closer to Allah.”
This is a reframing of the entire experience of intrusive thoughts; it is not evidence of failing faith, divine punishment, or that something is fundamentally wrong with you. It is a battle being waged by an enemy who has a strategy that can be turned against him!
The Prophetic tradition supports this entirely. When the Sahāba came to the Prophet ﷺ describing intrusive thoughts — thoughts so disturbing they could barely name them — he did not rebuke them. He smiled. He told them: that feeling of psychological aversion to those thoughts? That is a sign of īmān. You are not broken. You are being tested, and you are, in that very aversion, passing.
The way out is not to solve the thought. The way out is to leave it — let it be there, don’t feed it, don’t research it, don’t try to corner it with arguments — and go do something good.
For the person reading this at 2am
There is a particular version of this that many men will recognise, even if they have never named it.
It is not necessarily the dramatic crisis, the dissociation, the years of formal searching. It can be a slow accumulation of loss and silence: e.g. months of rejection, a home that has gone cold, a self that has become unfamiliar. The performance of being fine, sustained so long that it has started to cost everything.
And somewhere underneath it all, a belief — unspoken, possibly unexamined — that this is what you deserve. That Allah is angry with you. That a real man, a real Muslim, would not be here.
He does not say this, but it is there in the architecture of what he describes: the shame that keeps people from getting help. The idea that admitting difficulty is weakness. The sense that the path back requires becoming a different, better, more complete version of yourself before you are allowed to ask.
He would say this is wrong. Not as a theological correction, but as someone who has sat in exactly that place and found a way through.
The first move is the simplest and the hardest: have a good opinion of Allah.
Whatever He has planned is best for me. I leave it to Allah.
Remove the trials from my way, make things good for me, allow me to experience things which will bring me closer to You.
If you can get yourself in that space — that’s submission. That’s a powerful place to be.”
Note that it isn’t a sudden fix or a transformation. It is just one decision: to stop treating Allah as an adversary or a disappointed judge, and start treating Him as the only one Who has ever truly known you and still, unreservedly, wants good for you.
Then? Small actions. Don’t feel you need to do heroic things that announce themselves.
- The five minutes with your child that you give fully.
- Talking to the elderly neighbour who has not spoken to anyone in days.
- That smile you give someone without knowing what it would cost you to manufacture it.
The actions rebuild the wiring. The wiring changes how the thoughts land. The thoughts, deprived of the fear-adrenaline cycle they need to sustain themselves, begin — slowly but surely — to lose their grip.
Like he says,
There will be bad days. But keep going. And again, that boils down to what life is. It’s a test. It’s not to be.”
The brotherhood question
He ends with something that has nothing to do with frameworks or strategies.
He talks about the people around him. The brothers he met in his twenties. The ones who did not necessarily know everything that was happening inside him — but whose way of moving through difficulty, of handling things without collapsing, of being consistent and present and principled shaped him without being noticed.
Even if you don’t share with them what you’re feeling, what you’re going through — just being around people rubs off on you. You start behaving like them. You start picking up their traits.”
We know that the believer is a mirror to another believer. Not a mirror in the sense of reflecting back only what is presented — but in the deeper sense: your struggle is my struggle. Your strength is available to me. My presence is something I can offer you, even when I have no words.
Men, especially, need to hear this. The shame around asking for help, around being seen in difficulty, around needing something from others — it is real, and it is costing people their lives.
The Prophets experienced grief. The Companions experienced it. The Ummah was never a community of people who had everything under control. It was a community of people who held each other up when control was not possible.
You do not have to tell anyone everything. You do not have to have a conversation you are not ready for. But be somewhere. Be with people. Let the proximity do what words cannot.
What the Qur’ān already told us
Also near the end, he lands on something from Sūrat al-Duhā — the chapter revealed to the Prophet ﷺ in a period of silence, of pause, of wondering whether he had been abandoned.
مَا وَدَّعَكَ رَبُّكَ وَمَا قَلَىٰ ٣ وَلَلْـَٔاخِرَةُ خَيْرٌۭ لَّكَ مِنَ ٱلْأُولَىٰ ٤ وَلَسَوْفَ يُعْطِيكَ رَبُّكَ فَتَرْضَىٰٓ ٥
Your Lord has not forsaken you, nor is He displeased. And what comes after is better for you than what has passed. And your Lord will give to you, and you will be satisfied.” [2]
Everything that needs to be said to a person in the dark is in those lines. The denial of abandonment. The promise of what is coming. The reorientation from what has been lost to what is being built.
The campaign this article is part of — Hold On — exists because there are people reading this tonight who are close to giving up. Not dramatically. Not with a plan necessarily. Just with an exhausted sense that it is not going to get better, that they are too broken to be retrieved, that the distance between where they are and where they should be is too great to cross.
The message is not a theological argument. It is not a list of things to do.
It is simply this: what you are going through has a name. It has a path through it. You are not the first. Allah’s mercy reaches even here — especially here. And there is help, closer than you think.
Hold on.
Source: Hold On / Islam21c
Notes
[1] al-Qur’ān, 10:62
[2] al-Qur’ān, 93:3-5