Everywhere you turn, the Qur’an tells me, there is the face of God. But the devil too shows up in many guises.  

Sitting at the feet of this man, I watched with awe the pageantry that unfolded around him. Men fought to touch and press his feet, in their obeisance a redemption from violence long accepted and inflicted. Frantic women kissed his ring-laden fingers with a desire suppressed in joyless marriage. In an off-road strip of farmland in Michigan, he stretched back on a dark leather armchair, blue eyes shining with the light of another, better world. A world of beatific smiles, Christ-like forbearance, and the light of divine knowledge.   

A world with a door to which only he had the key.  

It started with pain, as it always does. I went looking for someone with a wand to take away the pain of a life long-attuned to placating power. I went in search of magical thinking, so I wouldn’t have to break a sweat on the road to self-transformation. This is the story of the pageantry, turbans, robes and thobes, of the hierarchies willingly and cruelly imposed in the name of ego-destruction upon inherently broken people. Of intelligent, colonized souls who could no longer hide their heads in the sand from the cruelty of the systems they had acquiesced to in a desperate bid for power. We sought redemption in a circus, a circus that billed itself as Islamic but replicated the very same systems we thought we had fled from.  

Because when we flee from something without transforming ourselves, it comes right back to bite us in the ass.  

This is a story of spiritual abuse. How we relinquish the most precious part of ourselves to others as a plaything. It is the story of how religion serves as one of the most potent forms of control precisely because it deals with the most potent part of who we are – our soul. For seven years, I was spiritually abused, along with countless others, by a man who took a centuries-old spiritual lineage and weaponized it to support state violence and gratify himself. This is also the story of state-sponsored Islamophobia, of the long arm of the War on Terror and how it crept into our communities undetected on the broken backs and in the cold, dead hearts of our own people. For years, this man psychologically broke down Muslims struggling with double consciousness, racism, Islamophobia and a deep religious ignorance, into becoming informants for law enforcement and the FBI and taking part in clandestine overseas trips to spy on Muslim organizations in other countries. A man who claimed to support women’s spiritual leadership by appointing a woman as the leader of one of his largest communities, a woman who spouted New Age spiritualism and faux feminism while voting Republican, running a DC-based outfit that marked Muslim children as terrorism threats, and taking selfies with Eric and Don Jr. A woman who was sleeping with the shaykh and used her adjacency to power to break down and terrorize everyone who came into her orbit.  

I can imagine his eyes gleaming when he first saw me approach. The perfect mark - a woman, bright, loving, with spiritual depth, thwarted at every turn from participating in the religious communities she loved because she didn’t dress the right way, speak the right lingo, or pay homage to the right people. And so he gave her what she needed: purpose. A spiritual mission. And permission to cater to the needs of anguished souls (another eager young woman was given permission to pray for the dead; yet another to spiritually “heal”). Yet she couldn’t tell the difference then between the fear that she wasn’t equipped to support these people, and the self-loathing that she was trying so hard to overcome. He didn’t help her discern the two; instead he manipulated her loathing to feed her fractured ego, pushing her with flattery to do things that she was not qualified to do, hoping to showcase her, with her many glittering degrees, in one of his political organizations.  

And yet, I refuse to play the victim card. Because there is another side to this story. That same woman, with all her goodness and sincere longing, was also accustomed to never being in need. A woman adjacent to power and money and networks in secular circles who resented never being the one in power in the new vocational home she had chosen for herself, religious studies. And so he gave her what she needed: power. Religious creds. An enormous F U to the white Muslim intellectual who had left her at the altar because she didn’t come across as Muslim enough. And for a while, I did find belonging and purpose in this group. I became confident in my ability to lead a religious gathering. I led dhikr. I used the beautiful voice that I had hidden for so long and sang with love and purpose.   

But something always felt out of place. My measure was all wrong, predicated not on what I stand for but on my own brokenness. Those seven years were a long and terrifying road to nowhere, like riding a cheap carousel at a five-and-dime theme park. You jump aboard with the promise of freedom - only to find that your horse is impaled. The view changes, but you’re only spinning in circles. And that tinny music goes on and on, creeping into every part of your brain until it drowns out the very word God and all that is left is ego and self-loathing.  

Even now, every few months I fall into a deep inexplicable sadness. I am haunted by shadows glancing over my shoulder, writing my every stray thought on an eternal scroll with a pen dipped in poison. For seven years, I handed over my soul to a charlatan, rejecting healthy wholesome empowering love for a broken longing that demanded either egotistic self-delusion or the shrinking of myself into a tiny little box with no holes for air. I stood rooted to the spot with my heart in my throat while a man who claimed to be a religious teacher ran his hand through my hair and asked to see me alone. Spiritual abuse draws potency from every other form of abuse – financial, psychological, and sexual – and yet its real and diabolical power rests in the violence it does to the human soul. The reality of this abuse is that we can’t discern the rot from the nuggets of truth. They are as inextricably linked in my psyche as mycelium are to the roots of every plant, tiny fungal tendrils that deliver life-giving nutrients and paralyzing toxins through the same living channel. If I let the poison seep into my body, I fear I will dissolve. If I push this rock off my chest, I fear I will rip off my chest wall.   

There is no easy answer and I can only speak for myself. For me, some healing has come from recognizing that there is no separation between the truth and the rot. The devil came into being at the very moment of humanity’s creation. Truth cannot exist without falsehood, creation and destruction go hand in hand, and the power to elevate is also the power to humiliate. Healing comes through finding and naming my own complicity, as an adult, in the abuse. Without giving the abusers a free pass, I had to name what I gained by participating in the masquerade even after I knew in every fiber of my being that it was a lie. My circumstances had made me an easy mark for a while, but I was never powerless. And while I had surrounded myself with people who applauded the charade, there were also clear and consistent voices that kept reminding me of who I really was. Not everyone is that fortunate.  

He is still rich and powerful, and his mind is fast fading with Alzheimers. His ex-mistress became an evangelical Christian and started a church where she peddles her conversion story to Islamophobic bigots for profit. Their measure was money and power, barely hidden under spiritual window-dressing. But the real truth is, so was mine. As someone who has always had access to power and position, I was seduced by the possibility that I could have that same access in the religious realm, this time in a pious package that would mask the stench of greed. Shams of Tabriz once said that the one who knows her devil knows her God. This devil shows up in many guises; as soon as I think I know his face, he puts on another, each one a little harder to discern, each one another facet of my shadow that I must confront before I can move forward. As a person committed to walking the spiritual path, no matter how much it hurts, I had to express my pain, acknowledge my role, forgive myself, forgive the abusers, and stay vigilant to my own weaknesses.  

The unique charge of humanity is to come awake, through the deepest of pain, to the truths that we would rather leave buried. It is to draw from the infinite, godly power of self-knowledge, and move forward with purpose.  

It is to say, with a voice strong and clear,

Everywhere I turn, there is the Face of God.