Blog post | August 20, 2025
In the article “Decolonising knowledge: a call to reclaim Islam’s intellectual legacy,” Shaykh Amin Kholwadia makes several salient points for the modern Muslim to reflect upon, particularly those in the field of medicine and psychiatry. This blog post explores its implications for transforming contemporary practice. To better understand this imperative, it is important to first understand its historical context and the profound impact colonization had on the Muslim world.
Prior to the advent of colonization, Muslims excelled in every domain: scholarship, trade, fine arts, technology, medicine. During this time, Islam informed the prevailing worldview and laid the foundational principles for each field of study. The sacred was intimately infused in even the mundane.
However, colonization disrupted civilizational progress and ushered in a period of profound decline. Educational institutions and intellectual traditions that were previously founded upon the principles of Islam and fueled Muslim advancement were neglected or replaced with systems servicing colonial interests.
Following political decolonization, the Golden Age was but a distant memory for Muslims. Seeking to recover their place in the global order, Muslims treaded a path that, as Shaykh Amin aptly illustrates, warrants critical scrutiny.
“It has led us to pursue aggressive efforts to further secularize Muslim values and promote misplaced priorities such as pushing for a nation’s entry into the World Cup, building the tallest skyscraper, hosting music festivals, spending billions to recruit the world’s top football players, and staging Formula One races. As an afterthought, there is also an appreciation for education, often reduced to importing Western universities into the Muslim world.”
Despite the political decolonization that occurred, intellectual and moral colonization maintained its stronghold in the Muslim mind. Muslims measured their success by the yardstick of Western approval and thus began to equate advancement with secularization.
As a result, academic fields previously founded upon Islamic principles became wholly secularized. “Islamic knowledge” became an entirely separate field of study, irrelevant in any sphere outside the masaajid and madrasas.
Thus, a dichotomy of knowledge was created: secular and sacred.
In his essay, Shaykh Amin staunchly rejects this false dichotomy and emphasizes the unity of all knowledge, for all knowledge originates from Allah. This necessarily precludes the existence of “secular” knowledge. He proposes an alternative framework: categorizing knowledge as “beneficial” and “more beneficial.” The first encompasses that which benefits individuals in this world, such as science, engineering, medicine, literature, and art. The latter encompasses that which benefits humans in the afterlife such as Qur’an, fiqh, and tasawwuf. Both categories of knowledge are necessarily informed by Islamic first principles.
The field of psychiatry—and medicine more broadly—provides a compelling case for both its necessity and advantages over the Western paradigm.
However, a pressing obstacle is that most Muslim medical and psychiatric practitioners regard the dichotomous “secular-sacred” paradigm of knowledge as a philosophically neutral framework, a presumption that obscures its underlying ideological commitments and the possibility of viable alternatives.
The information taught in medical schools and residency training programs is perceived to be “factual” and “metaphysically neutral.” Most Muslims believe it to be a purely scientific endeavor to which religion has nothing to contribute.
However, the reality is that no academic pursuit is metaphysically neutral.
The metaphysical and epistemological foundations of Western medicine and psychiatry differ significantly from those of Islam. Western epistemology relies primarily on knowledge derived from the five senses and human intellect. In contrast, the Islamic framework, as explained by Shaykh Amin, is more comprehensive—it includes these sources as well as knowledge conveyed through authentic reports, such as prophetic revelation.
This divergence yields contrasting conceptions of human nature, which is the object of study for medicine.
In the Western framework, the human being is understood to be a purely material being. This is because knowledge of man’s immaterial nature comes through revelation, which is excluded from Western epistemology. Consequently, the human mind is largely confined to the physical brain. This reductionist approach to the human experience shapes clinical practice, which interprets mental illness as a physical imbalance in brain chemistry. Treatments thus focus on material interventions such as psychoactive medications, electroconvulsive therapy, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. In recent years, to further understand the root causes of psychiatric disease, brain mapping and genomic testing have been the focus of research. However, despite billions of dollars spent and significant technological advances, progress has been limited—an observation echoed by Thomas Insel, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002 to 2015. He said,
“I spent 13 years at NIMH. I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”
As rates of mental illness continue to rise, it is evident that Western psychiatry, rooted in a false paradigm of “secular knowledge,” divested of the sacred, has proven insufficient to address the growing mental health crisis. However, the limitations of this dichotomous framework of knowledge are not only intellectual but also ethical. Shaykh Amin states, “Islam affirms that true creativity flows from Allah, and that inventions and innovations arise from honouring Allah’s knowledge of the world.” True noor, or light, cannot emanate from a system built upon principles of disbelief. The truth of this proposition is evident in the moral climate of modern psychiatric practice.
The ethical issues plaguing psychiatry are many. Among them are the over-prescription of highly addictive medications—such as benzodiazepines and stimulants—often prescribed without appropriate diagnostic indication. Patients frequently receive inadequate informed consent regarding the risks and potential harms of their treatments. Diagnostic criteria have been expanded, pathologizing normal emotional experiences largely to serve pharmaceutical marketing interests.
At the root of many of these ethical concerns is the pervasive influence of commercial interests on “scientific evidence.” Although the scientific literature is widely perceived as an objective and unbiased foundation for clinical guidelines and medical practice, the majority of clinical drug trials are funded and conducted by corporate sponsors with vested financial interests. A 2003 JAMA study noted that nearly 75% of clinical trial funding in the U.S.—psychiatric and otherwise—comes from industry sources.[i] This proves highly problematic.
In 2008, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that pharmaceutical companies selectively published clinical trials on antidepressants, favoring positive results that substantially exaggerated their effectiveness.[ii] According to the study, 94% of trials appeared positive when only 51% were. In 2004, an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal exposed internal documents from GlaxoSmithKline advising staff to withhold findings that paroxetine was ineffective in treating adolescents, deeming such data “commercially unacceptable.”[iii] In 2013, Johnson & Johnson was fined over $2.2 billion for promoting Risperdal—a potent antipsychotic with severe side effects including diabetes, weight gain, hyperlipidemia, hyperprolactinemia, and movement disorders—for unapproved uses in the most vulnerable populations – children, the elderly, and those with developmental disabilities.[iv] Countless other instances of such moral decrepitude are evident in psychiatry and medicine. Though individual physicians may be well intentioned, the literature and academic base informed by these unethical practices directly inform their clinical decisions. Given these challenges, Shaykh Amin reminds Muslims that seeking the pleasure of God and benefit for oneself in the akhira is the driving force to proceed in the world, contrasting starkly with the profit-driven motives of Western medicine.
With rising levels of mental illness amidst an intellectually and morally unsound psychiatric paradigm, Shaykh Amin proposes a solution:
“digging deeper into what scholars call the coloniality of knowledge, the persistent dominance of Eurocentric frameworks that continue to shape global intellectual thought, and advancing a theory of the desecularisation of knowledge. This requires realigning knowledge at the level of its epistemology, not merely in terms of politics or economics. Muslim scholars must take on the task of presenting and re-presenting a coherent and effective theory of our epistemology.”
At Dar al-Qasim, under the tutelage of Shaykh Amin Kholwadia, a group of mental health practitioners are pioneering a new framework for psychiatry built upon Islamic first principles. Beginning with the correct epistemology, an accurate understanding of the nature of man can be reached. Man is both material and immaterial; he is composed of a jism (physical body) and nafs. The nafs is the container of man’s immaterial elements, including the aql (intellect), ruh (spirit), and qalb (heart). The locus of “mental illness” may arise from any of these components. If the locus of disease resides in the physical body, then the appropriate physical intervention is required: this may include dietary changes, nutritional supplements, hormonal support, pharmacotherapy, or procedural interventions. If the etiology of disease lies in the immaterial nafs, then the treatment will be entirely different.
Diseases and treatments of the “nafs” can be reframed by three Islamic concepts: takhliya (removal), tahliya (adornment), and taswiya (balance). In the Qur’an, Allah says, wa nafsiw wa maa sawwaha: “And by the nafs and the One who balanced it.” The word sawwa comes from taswiyah, which is to take something uneven and make it even. Allah is informing man that the proper state of the human nafs is that of balance. To attain this balance (taswiyya), man must ward off or remove that which harms the nafs (takhliya) and acquire that which benefits it (tahliya). It is the Shariah or sacred law that provides the roadmap to ordering the nafs. As Shaykh Amin states, “Islamic law governs how Muslims act, react, and interact with the mundane world in ways that have direct implications for their afterlife.” It has directives for every aspect of man’s life including his religious obligations, food consumption, family interactions, commercial transactions, cognitive framing, and more. When man deviates from the Shariah and from the sunnah of the Prophet (peace be upon him), an imbalance arises, and symptomatology follows. Treatment involves returning the patient to alignment with divine commandments. The methodology of achieving this for a psychiatric patient is beyond the scope of this paper.
In conclusion, this framework for “mental illness” is not only more comprehensive and holistic, but it is founded upon necessarily true principles as revealed by Allah. It removes the dichotomous view of knowledge, infuses the sacred into the mundane, and allows light and true healing to ensue.
Chopra, S.S. “Industry Funding of Clinical Trials: Benefit or Bias?” JAMA, 2003. Link
Turner, E.H. et al. “Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials…” NEJM, 2008. Link
Kondro, W. “SSRI Use in Children Suppressed.” CMAJ, 2004. Link
DOJ. Johnson & Johnson Fined $2.2 Billion. Press Release