From the shadows to the light

the path of a rebirth

To Tariq Ramadan

To Maimouna Kobar
who was always there
at a time when I
needed so much
presence and human
warmth
 In the name of God the most merciful

It may be that you hate something and it is good for you, it may be that you
love something and it is bad for you. God knows and you don't know. 1

Trials remove the veils of the heart, it is a condition of the rooting of faith,
a sign of divine love: for "This Qur'an was revealed in sorrow".2.
 Introduction

The meaning of our life, A test

"We created death and life to test you and to know which of you acted
better..."3.

Our life is a great school of humility and resistance. The humility to

recognize that something is missing and the dignity to act to reform it. From
physical and emotional peace to spiritual peace, passing through intellectual
and social development; we all have our own challenges, with humility we
try to take them up, according to the objective conditions of our life and
within the limits of our capacities, as much as we can in patience and
perseverance.

This booklet is a journey through the sinuosities of a path, from the shadows
to the light, I try to retrace the sufferings and trials that have forged me. It is
not always easy to navigate through one's memory. However, if I could
change it, I would not change anything: our past is our school, it is what
made us who we are; but we have the choice at a given moment of our life,
to choose what type of human being we want to become? We can of course
be tempted to be a victim and to react as such; to say that everything that
happens to us is the fault of others, or we can be a subject who sees the
sufferings and difficulties as trials on his way; an opportunity to grow, to
rise, by choosing to act in the best way within his means and capacities in
other words, it is the meaning that you give to your sufferings which make
you pass from the status of victim to the status of subject: the dignity of our
action at the heart of our suffering transforms and elevates us. With the help
of the Most High, we can do things that we could not even imagine being
able to do. We may be limited, certainly, we may doubt our abilities,
looking objectively at our reality: this is our humility; but what is amazing is
that God comes where he did not expect. As true as he has the power of the
succession of the day and the night, he has in the same way the power to
change radically our situation, provided that we answer his call, to do what
he asks us, and to make our choices within the limits of our power and our
knowledge: the success is our efforts with the awareness that when we are
with God we can more than the limit of our powers. This is where the
invocation takes on its full meaning. This is also the meaning of "tawakul":
 God decides everything, it is to Him that belongs the results and whatever
His decision is, it is always good, even if we do not understand it
immediately or if it hurts us, we must trust God in our heart by looking for
the signs that accompany our ordeal: all those things that help us to hold on
to the signs of God's presence in the heart of the ordeal that soothe the
questions of our intelligence God does not ask us to do more than what He
has given us to do, therefore, we have the means and much more with His
power, but we must not forget that:
"God does not change the condition of a people (or individuals), if He does not
change what is in themselves"4, in other words their own being
.
 First part

From the shadows

 "Strength is to assume one's weaknesses and not to convince
oneself that one has overcome them".

Tariq Ramadan.

A Meeting

I didn't know why she had come, we had moved months earlier with our
father after his divorce to a region where he was assigned as a banker: "I am
your father's friend", she said to me, without suspecting once that she was
going to become the mistress of the house. One morning at breakfast our
father sat at the end of the table and served us as usual, he had fun doing it,
he informed us that he was going to marry the foreign woman "his friend"
that we had taken in.
We were not used to hearing these kinds of words from him, we just burst
out laughing but we did not know that these laughs would soon turn into
sadness and anguish.

The marriage was done discreetly, to tell the truth I don't know how it
happened, but it was sure that this woman became my aunt, she was a
superstitious, neurotic woman who often had tantrums, always dissatisfied,
she spent all her time complaining, she didn't like us and she called our
grandmother a witch. That's when I understood that our father was really
weak: he accepted to be diminished by his wife without reacting and he
always took her defense. He was afraid of her and so were we. The
atmosphere in the house was unbearable, we had to pretend to be happy to
make a good impression, we couldn't enter the living room or open the
fridge for the first time, I felt like a stranger in our own house, that's why I
preferred to be at school than to come back to this cold and soulless house.
A Father

He was a person whose life's purpose was performance, material well-being

and social recognition, "to be the first" above all others: for him, this is what
makes a man valuable. This behavior hid a complex, that of not being
sufficiently recognized by people, he had this inferiority complex compared
to people who had a higher social rank than him and he admired the
greatness of the West: their way of life, their progress and their technology,
in his eyes they are the incarnation of human intelligence. He does not
tolerate failure or error, let alone weakness, from himself or others. That's
why I experienced a great psychological violence in his presence: I lost my
means at the slightest task he asked me to do knowing that he was watching
me. In spite of my good results that I presented to him that left him
indifferent, when I approached him to present him my copy, he looked at
me with a dark and tense face and he returned it to me without any
appreciation.

A mother, Indifference

She was at the center of my life: I lived only to please her, despite her icy
coldness, I sought by all means to have her attention, a benevolent look. She
was a woman who showed no affection for us, she communicated only with
cries, contempt, disgust, hatred, insults and indifference, her presence was a
dark violence: she took away all my energy, all my joy of living to plunge
me into a permanent sadness and anguish. It took me a long time to
understand the cause of her contempt and her indifference towards us, it is
undoubtedly her forced marriage with our father whom she hates viscerally
and who disappointed her ambitions to continue her studies, given that she
was gifted at school, our presence awakens her wound, We are the cause of
all her misfortunes and disappointments, we stole the life she wanted to lead,
but she wanted us to succeed socially so that we could be the instruments of
her material well-being, a kind of revenge on the life that stole her social
ascension. Certainly, nature would like the mother to love her child beyond
everything: there would be a strong link between the mother and the child,
"a secret of the entrails" in which the mother loves her child in spite of
everything, but this is not a rule that applies to all mothers, unfortunately.
Tarzan syndrome or emotional dependence

For a long time, I lived with this feeling without being able to put it into
words. I noticed that what made me live or have a feeling of existence was
the attention and the positive judgement of people, I need the mediation of
the other to feel I was. I was unable to give myself value: I had a very low
self-esteem. With time, I understood that this wound came from having
grown up with a cold and egocentric father and a heartless mother. As a
result, I was never myself during all this time, I played roles in which I was
excessively nice to people who are at the same time the source of my well
being and of my ill being: it is from the nature of their look on me that I
define myself and that I evaluate my value. I was viscerally attached to
them in the hope of getting some attention and recognition to calm for a
moment my insatiable desire to be loved.

Depression

We don't want to get up, nor to wash ourselves, nor to smile. To exist, to see
time passing is unbearable. All the simplest tasks of the daily life, the least
physical or intellectual effort are heavy burdens: we are inhabited by a
constant moral and physical fatigue as if all our vital energy had evaporated.
A feeling of guilt invades us, we have destructive ideas against ourselves
and desires of suicide. The people around us do not understand us, they think
that we are lazy, that we want to do nothing on purpose. This reaction
accentuates our feeling of guilt and uneasiness: we know that we are
incapable of doing all these little chores of daily life that seem so simple but
so complex and heavy to us. We have lost our desire, the desire to want, we
are empty inside us like a zombie, we exist without our spark of life.

Suicide

It is undoubtedly satanic suggestions that take advantage of our state of

weakness in order to incite us to put an end to our difficult life, full of
suffering, pain and despair. Some people think that it is selfish to want to end
one's life because it would hurt those who "love" us, but what we really want
is not to die, but to get rid of our daily discomfort, to stop suffering in silence,
to have a little respite, to stop an absurd life that robs us of our life, but also
to make a desperate appeal to the people around us who are deaf to our pain.
Masochism

This behavior may seem strange: to seek in the physical or psychological

harm that one voluntarily inflicts on oneself and in the violence that one
undergoes by others "pleasure", a delight in pain: a paradox.

Yet I understand all this, when pain is your daily life, your inseparable
companion, when you have forgotten the feeling of joy and pleasure of
normal people then your suffering becomes your friend with which you
find your consolation, your refuge. We are now able to taste the euphoria
of our pain

Stockholm Syndrome

It is a proof that the reasons of the heart exceed the logic of our
understanding: to manage to love someone in spite of all the sufferings that
he makes us undergo. This is a perversion of love and alienation.
Unfortunately, people who have no self-esteem and who are convinced that
they are worthless are in danger of falling prey to an executioner whom they
love in spite of themselves.
The hatred of love

A contradiction of terms which says the conflict between the heart and the
reason. We hate the love we feel for the other: we feel dispossessed of our
being. Our heart has betrayed us by giving power to someone who
manipulates us, exploits us and makes us suffer. Another revelation of a
disharmony of our being.

Abandonment

However, there are children whose parents are alive and well, who have the
feeling of being orphans, the feeling of being an object, a piece of furniture
that we look at without seeing, like a leaf in the middle of the wind that turns
as it pleases, we have no roots, nowhere to lean, nowhere to talk, nowhere to
cry. Left to themselves, these children cling to people to whom they have
felt a little attention, a little recognition that gives them a brief moment: a
feeling of existence.
The pleasures of sin

We want to stop time, to have a moment of respite, to forget our

unhappiness, to escape from our suffering, to live something other than the
pain in order to remember for a moment the sensation of pleasure. We then
turn to the pleasures of the body, drink, sex and drugs that plunge us for a
moment in a deceptive ephoria: the fall after the euphoria is brutal, almost
inhuman. Pornographic films, fornication or sex without love, and drugs
unfortunately become a band-aid to soothe our pain that gnaws at us daily,
a truce that helps us to last one more day.

Leaving home

We no longer find our place, we have lost our bearings and we are no
longer ourselves. The people who think they love us see us as an
element of the scenery that we look at without consideration: we are an
object that we use, that we exploit like a machine where we seem to
have no more conscience, nor affect, nor intelligence, nor hope, even
less dignity: we are only reduced to a useful object for the use that we
would like to make of it Then pushed by a spark of revolt which
slumbers in our interior, we want to leave far from all these people, from
the hypocrisy and the human comedy, far from the indifference; and far
from the unworthy. We want to free ourselves from our chains, from our
executioners. To go into exile far from home in order to find oneself
inside.
Second
part

To the
light
Forgive

Coming from a divorced family, I grew up with my father and an aunt in an

atmosphere so unbearable that the fact of finding myself at school seemed to
me a moment of recreation. I was particularly angry at my father because of
his indifference, his unfair judgments, his unjustified blows, his insults to my
intelligence, created in me a wound of rejection, which later conditioned my
relationship to myself and to others. Indeed I developed a personality which
lacks confidence by being very self-effacing, which devalues itself and which
feels guilty by comparing itself to others.
This wound is reactivated every time I make a clumsy mistake in front of him,
as insignificant as it may be, it is experienced as a tragedy in my heart and a
feeling of panic invades me. I lose all my means in his presence: I need a
colossal effort to express myself in front of him, I lose all my energy, all my
vitality and I feel extremely oppressed: a dark violence.

Over time I realized that I disliked my father so much that I felt hatred. I didn't
feel the need to talk to him or even sit with him. The nature of this relationship
was tearing me apart inside, how can you hate your own father? In addition to
that I knew the Koranic injunction regarding parents, even though I obeyed my
father I did so without heart, without love and this kept my resentment alive. I
understood that the Islamic principle of respect and service to parents cannot
be applied without heart, without love. Someone who would impose this
principle on me in its letter lacks psychology. Even if I were told that it is not
natural to dislike one's father, I would answer that it takes a lot of love to feel
hatred because this hatred is only a disappointed, wounded, smothered love. I
managed to rebuild myself and to forgive my father by first moving away from
him to find a more serene environment with an uncle who gave me the
emotional and psychological balance that I needed. It is in this period that I
understood thanks to a book entitled: "The five wounds that prevent us from
being ourselves" that my father himself suffered from this wound of rejection,
I learned that my grandfather neglected him and never accompanied him,
consequently he only transmitted his suffering unconsciously that he did not
know how to soothe. At this precise moment my glance on him changed and I
felt compassion towards him, For the first time since years I really saw my
father. I now know that it is his wound that makes him act this way. When you
don't have this rejection wound, you always want to prove your worth by being
a perfectionist and if you don't live up to it, you blame yourself, you execute
yourself and you constantly devalue yourself. I forgave my father and all the
mistakes he would make afterwards, I would manage insha'Allah to overcome
them because I would no longer look at his mistakes through the filter of my
wound but through that of the love I have for him.
Getting out of depression: Spiritual liberation

I am someone who likes to serve people, seeing a smile on people's faces

makes me happy but at the same time, I have always had this feeling of being
in need of love, to the point that I don't feel strong enough to face certain
looks; this sensitivity' is a great suffering since I always need to be reassured
by a gesture by a kind look or a tender word. Although this sensitivity was
present and the suffering was real, it didn't prevent me from living; but on the
eve of an exam my life changed: In this phase of my life, I discovered what
euphoria, depression, suicide and the psychiatric hospital are. - I believe that
the interior suffering that one lives in the depressive period is inhuman: the
only fact to exist is unbearable. It is in this episode of my life that I
understood that in fact some people do evil because they suffer, to suspend
judgment on people: we do not know what they live inside their hearts.-
Although I was living without living, the impression of being a zombie, a
part of me wanted to resist: it was by listening to a conference that spoke
about self-confidence and that explained - in fact that there is in us a big "I",
a harmonious and luminous version of ourselves, and a small "I", what we
usually are, and it's because this inner light inhabits us that we realize that we
are not doing well: in order to realize that it's dark, there has to be a little
light. This conference gave me a hope like I never had before: I told myself
that there is something in me that could make me better than what I am.
Before that I had listened to a lecture that talked about the fitra and a lecture
that explained the attestation of the Muslim faith but I can say that it was
with the lecture that talked about self- confidence given by a non-Muslim
that made me understand the meaning of Faith; I understood that all my
actions must be directed towards the search in this spark that God has put in
me; this fitra present in every human being and which is in fact the essence of
my relationship with Him:by returning to this source we acquire inner peace
which frees us from the tensions of the heart; this experience of proximity
with the divine gives us a new Life: our emotions are more positive, our
body healthier, our intelligence sharper contrary to what the common people
think our reason is not our only faculty of comprehension it is -even- limited;
the heart understands more deeply than the reason and it is also a light which
stimulates the latter. This dimension is underlined by the Qur'an when it says:
"It is not the eyes that become blind but the hearts inside the chests"5 ..
Moreover, we live in harmony with the divine prescription: when the heart
adheres to the rules we live not in constraint but in the true freedom of being.
This implies disciplining oneself by taking charge of one's mind in order to
acquire more knowledge about oneself, about the Qur'an and about the world:
knowledge is a means of getting closer to God and it is with knowledge that
we can with our freedom' master ourselves and get out of the ego with His
help. In addition to the education of my mind I had to wake up my body from
sleep and laziness through sport: the medicines I was taking had made me
amorphous - I always remember the name of the Most Merciful to remind me
that I am acting to answer His call. I always remember the name of the Most
Merciful One to remind me that I am acting in response to His Call. Thank
God I was able to recover from this period which was a real descent into hell
and at the same time the path He traced to bring me closer to Him.
Praise for Madness
This is not about beings who seem to have lost their self-awareness and who
live in a parallel world where they are the only ones who know the secrets.
There is a "madness" which is not the effect of the results of drugs but the
unveiling of another aspect of our being "the soul" or the order of the heart,
the access to this dimension makes us perceive another reality which has its
own logic, we will say irrational: we reach here the limits of rationality.
Certain schools of psychology, such as Jungian psychology, recognize this
idea that there is something that inhabits man and that precedes human
consciousness. The Koranic tradition sheds light on this subject by saying
that it is the fitra, a spark that is in search of transcendence, which asks the
question of the meaning of life, the meaning of existence, an impulse that
God has put inside the heart of each human being which is the essence of the
link between man and the divine,A debt that man must repay by recognizing
the divine in conscience, even to those who deny it, it will be said that this
spark is veiled or sealed but it remains inside of being, as translated in the
Koran: "And when your Lord drew from the loins of the sons of Adan their
descendants and made them testify against themselves [asking them]: "Am I
not your Lord? They said, "Yes, we do. And this is so that you will not be
able to say on the day of resurrection, "We did not know. "6 And we also
have in another verse the understanding of this impulse: "And direct your
face [your being] as a sincere monotheist, the natural disposition with which
God [fitra Allah] created mankind. There is no change in God's creation.
This is the right [eternal] religion, but the majority of people do not know.
This is what the historian of religions Mircea Eliade21, visiting the most
remote parts of the world, said when he said: "the religious is constitutive of
the structure of human consciousness". The role of all the revelations that
God has sent at a given moment in the course of human history is to bring
up what is buried in man and which he has forgotten. It is only when man
returns to the spark of his heart by following the path traced by the prophets
and messengers of God that he reaches inner peace with himself, with his
fellow men and with the creation; it is this return to the interior of oneself
that makes us a man before God and among men: We are freed from all that
colonizes our heart like our ego, the love of the appearance, the love of the
power, the love of the money and the things of the life of this world, what
one calls the minor association to be able to thus find our healthy heart
nourished and connected by the divine only; one reaches thus, with an
interior peace, with new feelings, new perceptions, a new life, with the true
Life, as underlines it the coran: "Oh you who carry faith answer to God and
to his messenger when he calls you to what makes you Live "8 .
Unfortunately, in the materialistic world in which we live, where everything
that is not rational is necessarily madness, we see more and more people
who discover their spiritual side in spite of themselves by accessing new
perceptions such as "almost magical" synchronicities, very intense
sensations that they do not really understand, so most of them end up in
psychiatric hospitals and are invented disorders: Bipolar Disorder, Manic
Access etc.. Modern psychology does not integrate the spiritual aspect of the
human being. We pretend to be able to treat these "sick people" with
psychotropic drugs that they have to take for life without forgetting that
these "drugs" have side effects that destroy the person slowly.

Psychotropic drugs

Whether we are suffering from psychosis or neurosis, these "drugs" have

destructive effects on the person's health: they atrophy everything that is
human in us, our emotions, our thoughts, our vitality, our joy of living. We
become zombies who exist without living. Psychiatrists do not know how
these drugs act on our brains: they feel their way by giving us a certain dose
and they observe their effects with us. We realize that these drugs do not
cure us, they simply mask the symptoms with side effects that are much
more difficult to live with than our own disorder: the effects can be
irreversible, as taking haldol in the long term will lead to tardive dyskinesia,
in the same way all psychotropic drugs cause the patient to gain weight,
which can go as far as obesity.
Psychologist, Psychology and Spirituality

This is a strange profession: we have to pay a person to be listened to,

comforted, advised. Surprisingly, the psychologist has no affinity with the
patient, how can we create a total break with someone who has confided in
us? We only have a timed relationship and we are reduced to our disorder.
Accompanying someone in order to make a profit is not an accompaniment,
it is a perversion of the human relationship: the psychologist is not really
interested in our relief but simply in his fees at the end of each session.
Moreover, psychiatrists or psychologists want you to tell them that their
treatment has done you good and that it is thanks to them that you feel
better, which is completely false. All the "drugs" they give you will degrade
you internally, you become like a zombie without affect and some "drugs"
have irreversible side effects. As for me, I was forcibly committed to a
psychiatric hospital for 1 month and these so-called doctors were unable to
tell me what I was suffering from, they simply told me that I had too much
energy and
that this was not normal. What is the most worrying is that once you have
entered their system, they want to make you a patient for life, you become in
fact dependent on them, you will never be completely autonomous; they will
tell you that if you leave the "medication", you will relapse again - normally
a medication is supposed to cure an illness that has been well identified, but
this is not the case here - modern psychology does not integrate the spiritual
aspect of the human being in its conception of man: Psychologists and
psychiatrists want to act and understand psychological disorders only
according to these four aspects: They tell us, for example, that bipolar
disorder is caused by a disturbance of neurotransmitters in the brain, which
would legitimize the use of mood regulators, but no serious study can prove
that psychiatric disorders in general are of biological origin: no reliable
medical test can objectively show the biological cause of your psychiatric
disorder, I am not inventing anything, these are recognized psychiatrists like
the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, Dr Peter R. Breggin or Joanna
Moncriz.Breggin or Joanna Moncrief who affirm it. The big problem with
psychiatrists is that they cannot have the same diagnostic rigor as a classical
doctor who can through tests and analyses show you clearly the biological
cause of your illness and therefore doctors can intervene with drugs or other
procedures to cure our illness permanently if it is curable.
Psychiatrists do not even know how the "medicine" they give us acts on us;
although some psychology theories allow us to understand certain human
behaviors and even manipulate them, psychologists and psychiatrists have
no power to cure psychiatric illnesses: For example, we know that Dr.
Breuer's patient, Anna O (Bertha Pappenhein), presented by Freud20 in his
book The Five Lessons of Psychoanalysis, was never cured of her old
hydrophobia by means of psychoanalysis sessions, anguish and alcohol
were her refuges, contrary to what Freud told us. Personally, I had
difficulties in life until it led me to a depression and I repeat that
psychiatrists and psychologists only accentuated my discomfort which
really saved me: I was looking for a solution to get out of the depression
which made me walk next to life: it is the religion, in particular the Muslim
religion, which delivered me from my discomfort, how did it happen?
Islam has a conception of man which stipulates that there is something in
the heart of man, a spark inside us which is in search of transcendence
which is not immediately accessible by reason but which will become it. It
is this spark that pushes us to ask existential questions, the meaning of life,
the meaning of death. This impulse, this breath is called the fitra; when this
impulse finds its answer, we find an inner peace-which is fundamental in the
Muslim religion, once the impulse has found its answer, we must now walk
within ourselves to find God and free ourselves from our ego by applying
the Islamic way, the sharia which is the way that leads us to the fitra, our
spark; this will give us a real inner peace: we have a life of the heart which
gives us a new life: our emotions are positive; our bodies are healthier and
our intelligence more perceptive: This is possible because we have found
our inner light and we live in harmony with it; there is also a light that
springs from our face-all this is accessible only through experimentation;
even if there are fundamental divergences between the monotheistic
traditions, the objectives and the spiritual teachings are the same: to become
aware of oneself, to identify and master the nature and the power of the
emotions and to reach harmony and a higher form of freedom. In addition, it
is necessary to add that in spiritualities such as in the Buddhist tradition,
even if there is no God, they say something fundamental that is shared by all
monotheistic religions, namely that the human being can only reach
harmony and inner freedom with self-control. We need to free ourselves
from our ego in order to reach harmony with ourselves, We need to free
ourselves from our ego in order to reach harmony with ourselves, with
human beings and with nature - as underlined by the psychoanalyst Yung,
who said that psychic healing is only acquired when the subject travels to
the deepest part of his being - what he calls the individuation process, that is
to say, the personal transformation due to the encounter with our inner light,
which he calls the universal unconscious.
Finding the Spark: The Islamic Way

It is important to know that we do not come to God naturally, even if He has

put the spark of faith in our heart, it takes a demanding effort on our part to
truly live it by following the Islamic way: an education - educating our
body, heart and mind.

To begin with, the first attitude that we must have at the beginning of the
journey is one of gratitude, thanking God for what we are and for what
we have, it is this positive outlook that we must have in all circumstances
because it is with these feet that we walk to reform our Being.

The first effort we have to make is the fight against our own forgetfulness,
it is to work on our memory and our conscience to remember the presence
of God, what we call the zikr, the fact of remembering God in all the
circumstances of life, but not as a being who watches over us in our faults,
but as a being who accompanies our efforts to approach Him, when we
come to Him while walking, He comes to us while running.When we are
alone, before eating, before sleeping, in all the activities of our daily life,
when we remember Him, our action takes on a spiritual dimension and
becomes a prayer. We must also make an effort on our own look at
creation, not to see creation as elements but as signs of God's presence:
"The star and the tree bow down" 9"And
there is not an element that does not sing his praises10"... "but you do not
understand their song of reverence"10; we also have another verse that draws
our attention to the signs of creation that echo the signs of the microcosm of
our own Being: "we will show them our signs in the horizons and them even
until it becomes clear to them that this is the truth"11.The second of the
things : It is the proximity of the life of the prophet Muhammad -PSL- and
the reading of the Koran especially during the fajr or in the middle of the
night (the night is a privileged moment for the prayer because the
concentration is greater),It is necessary to add that one must make two
cycles of prayer before the fajr by reading respectively the sura Al ikhlass
and Al kafiroun, but reading the Koran without understanding has no effect
on us, on the other hand the reading of the Koran by understanding the
meaning of the verses purifies our heart and brings us closer to Him what is
called the reading of adoration Thirdly, respecting the rites, indeed the rites
are exercises, if we practice them, they allow us to control ourselves. For
example, prayer prevents us from falling into evil in the same way that
youth exercises us to master the human in us: the fact of abstaining from
drinking, eating, having sexual relations allows us to reconcile ourselves
with our inner breath, that spark I spoke about at the beginning. And why
mastery is important, in fact our adult state is a state of tension between
contradictory aspirations: those that elevate us and those that lower us and
degrade us; as the Koranic text affirms: "By the soul and what has balanced
it and inspired its libertinism or its piety. He will certainly be happy who has
purified it, he will certainly be lost who has corrupted it. 12We must not deny
anything of that it is God who created us so we are innocent but we are
responsible for their management and the mastery of this dark side will
allow to liberate our inner breath: the more we approach the breath the more
we get closer to God: "The knowledge of God is between man and his
heart"13; the work of the zikr that we do which is the heart of all Islamic
teaching allows this mastery. Fourthly it is the good behavior, the action of
the good the fact of giving of oneself to please God, that starts with our
parents as underlined by the Koranic verse: "Your Lord decreed that you
worship only Him, and He prescribed kindness towards your father and
mother"14 and in another verse which goes in the same direction; even if our
parents are unjust: "And if they command you to associate with me that of
which you have no knowledge, do not obey them, accompany them
according to the right custom and follow the way of the one who has
returned to Me.15 Then there are the poor and the abandoned of the society.
Clearly one cannot approach God if one does not serve one's parents and is
not close to the poor or does not fight for their dignity in society, in the same
way that the rites allow us to work on our ego to master ourselves, the action
of good is necessary to work on our ego and master our arrogance and pride
Fifth is the love of knowledge, the more I know myself, the closer I get to
the one who created me and the more I know the creation the closer I get to
the Creator. All this work requires time, so we must have patience and
perseverance. To be demanding and indulgent because we are doing our best
and to recognize our weaknesses and limitations, which must cultivate in us
a sense of humility (recognizing that we can't do it) and responsibility but
not guilt: we can only walk on God's path with His help. In our process of
transformation, sometimes we will take one step forward today and two
steps back tomorrow. This is why we need God's forgiveness, which
is our real strength: by asking God's forgiveness in our struggle to come
closer to Him, He will help us where we can't. In reality, we can only find
our inner light when we understand our need for Him: we must
communicate with Him constantly; we must tell Him our wounds, our
weaknesses, our shortcomings in order to find His strength: He is the one
who sees and hears everything we show and hide; our sincerity regarding
our weaknesses and everything that is inside of us allows us to move
towards true strength with His help. In summary: good behavior, based on
the respect of the rites with the proximity of the Koran and the life of the
prophet Muhammad -PSL- allows us to walk towards ourselves and to walk
towards ourselves is to walk towards God and thus reach the balance and the
interior peace: Salam matou nafs.

Illumination: the meaning of faith

Faith is not only that I say with my intelligence that God exists and I submit
myself to him following the prophetic tradition; in this case one is not a
Muslim but one is not yet a believer: "The Bedouins said we have believed,
say rather we are submitted but faith has not entered your heart"15; it is a
fragile stage that can give way to doubts, up to the denial of God, if one does
not commit oneself to deepen it. Faith is a state of security, of serenity, of
inner peace that we reach in the course of our journey thanks to demanding
efforts on our practice and on our behavior: it is an inner light that we carry
with which we walk through people. In other words, it is the reconciliation
of our inner light or fitra with the light of revelation that makes us reach
faith: we have the Qur'anic formula that underlines this marriage by
speaking of "light up on light"16, without forgetting that this illumination is
a grace that God gives to whom he wants.
Night Prayer

The night prayer is an essential practice in our quest for light and for
building our personality as believers. The Qur'an emphasizes in Surah Al
Muzamil which was revealed to the Prophet (pbuh) at the beginning of his
mission (a time of persecution when Muslims wondered where the strength
was?) that requires the Prophet and the believers to pray at night as a
condition of the rooting of faith to face the adversity of men during the day.
During this period the night prayer was obligatory: "Get up for a part of the
night, a little more or a little less and recite the Qur'an in a balanced way, we
are going to bring down on you a word of great weight, the prayer at the
beginning of the night leaves an imprint and allows a more sustained
attention"17: as the Most High affirms, the Qur'anic words are heavy, so
heavy that if these words were to come down on a mountain, you would
have seen it crumbling.In other words, the Qur'an which is capable of
destroying a mountain also has the potential, if it penetrates the human heart,
to build it, to elevate it, to make it the mountain: it will give it the strength to
be, to see and to understand deeply with the heart.

Emotion and spirituality

Our emotions are the product of external similes that act on our brain, we
cannot control our emotional reactions: we are programmed to react like
this. By knowing how the brain works we are able to create emotions, this is
how advertising, the film and music industry and psychologists exploit this
human flaw to make us react in a certain way. Is it possible to master what
seems to escape us? Are we able to stop being the object of our emotions?
Our spirituality is the only source of freedom of the heart: it allows us to be
more than a purely reactive object; it requires a demanding work on
ourselves but it is the key which frees us from our desires, our passions, our
dependences, our material and immaterial idols, our illusions. It is in this
spirituality that we also discover true love: it is not the instantaneous love
that we can feel naturally or a passionate love, attached, which pushes us to
want to possess the other, which causes suffering (sometimes leading to
hatred or death). Spiritual love is a liberating love in which we find a
superior well-being, a love without attachment that is born from the depths
of our being and that loves by accepting the separation, which should not be
confused with the raw emotion felt in the superficiality of our being.
Faced with hardship

In the midst of our struggles and sorrows, we must know how to thank the
Most High by looking at all that He has given us: our qualities, our efforts,
our progress, what we are and what we have: It is this confident and positive
attitude about our qualities and the trust we have in the divine power that
will allow us to fight against everything that is lacking and that makes us go
beyond our limits with His help, never complaining by focusing on what we
lack; knowing in spite of all that we lack, that there are others who live a life
that is much more difficult than us: this intellectual attitude allows us to be
aware of what we have and to thank Him more. Observe the signs that
surround us that accompany the trial, all those things that help us to hold on,
that give us strength, that are signs of the presence of God in the heart of the
trial. To hope, moreover, to be grown by our trials: with the difficulty there
is always an ease, it is the law of God, in any circumstance never to forget
the meaning of death: we belong to God and it is to Him that we return. On
our way, there will be people because they have a social status, a material
well-being, and will have the arrogance to judge us on the appearances, on
our lacks by looks, and unworthy attitudes as if the value of a man is in his
having, as close as they are, They are not our friends, as well as the people
who say they are your brother but at the slightest weakness, they take you
out of their circle and you can never be yourself. These people are brakes,
they diminish us, devalue us, make us doubt ourselves and divert us from
our priorities. Our true allies are those who have a dignity of Being: "The
best of you is the one with the deepest God-consciousness"18. They are the
companions of our path who help us to improve ourselves, they are our
mirror in which we reveal ourselves, we don't have to pretend: they are the
brothers who love us in God alone and they lift us up when we have bent our
leg. Finally, to know how to ignore the judgment of men: to take care of
what God knows: He sees, recognizes, accompanies our efforts and that
should be enough for us.
Accept:

When we encounter suffering and illness, we understand the meaning of

vulnerability and insignificance. Then the preoccupations of this world
disappear, as do the struggles for recognition, power and prestige. What
remains is strength and salvation: inner exile, silence and trust in God, which
consists in entrusting Him with our wounds and our powerlessness in the
face of pain and illness, in order to rely fully on His love and power. To
accept our fragility and to accept His will. To accept is the most beautiful
freedom.

Conclusion

I dedicate this booklet to all those who have experienced the psychiatric
hell that dehumanizes patients and treats them like guinea pigs by forcing
them to ingest drugs that turn them into zombies, and to all those who,
because of their psychological disorder, are treated in an
Table of contents :

Part 1: From the shadows

Introduction

1 A meeting

2 A Father

3 A mother: Indifference

4 Tarzan syndrome or emotional dependence

5 Depression

6 Suicide

7 Masochism

8 Stockholm Syndrome

9 The hatred of love

10 Abandonment

11 The pleasures of sin

12 Leaving your own

Part 2: To the light

1 Forgiveness

2 Getting out of depression: spiritual liberation

3 Praise for Madness

4 Psychotropic drugs

5 Psychologist, Psychology and Spirituality

6 Finding the Spark: The Islamic Way

7 Illumination: The Meaning of Faith

8 Night Prayer

9 Emotion and spirituality

10 Facing hardship

11 Accept

Conclusion
Notes:

1 Quran 2:216

2 Prophetic tradition

3 Quran 67:2

4 Quran 13:11

5 Quran 22:46

6 Qur'an 7:72

7 Qur'an 30:30

8 Qur'an 8:24

9 Quran 55:6

10 Quran 17:44

11 Quran 41:53
12 Quran 91:7-10

13 Qur'an 8:24

14 Quran 17:23

15 Quran 49:13

16 Quran 24:35

17 Qur'an 73:5-6

18 Quran 49:13

19 Carl Gustav Jung: is a Swiss psychiatrist born on July 26, 1875, he is the founder of analytical
psychology. He is the author of numerous works, notably the Red Book.
20 Sigmund Freud: was born on May 6, 1856 and died on September 23, 1939 is an Austrian
neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis.
21 Mircea Eliade, born on March 23, 1907 and died on April 22 in Chicago is a Roman historian of
religions, mythologist, philosopher and novelist.
Pierre Roger Breggin: is an American psychiatrist known for his radical critique of electroconvulsive
therapy, psychotropic treatments and the biomedical model of psychiatry.

Author of numerous books including Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases
of Violence and

Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and

the Psychopharmaceutical, Toxic psychiatry.
Joanna Moncrieff: is a British psychiatrist and Critical Psychiatry network personality. She is a
prominent critic of the modern "psychopharmacological" model of mental disorder and addiction
treatment, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry.
Author of The myth of the chemically cured: A critique of psychiatric drug treatment.

Thomas Szasz: born on April 15, 1920 and died on September 8, 2012 is a professor emeritus of
Hungarian psychiatry and author of numerous books including: the myth of mental illness.
Biography
At 18 years old, Ibrahima had a bright future. He was in his final year of high school in France
and was planning to study philosophy in France when he suffered a psychotic break.  He tried to
end his life to free himself from the weight of his pain and the incomprehension of those around
him. He ended up in a psychiatric hospital where he crossed paths with a psychiatrist who put
words without appeal on his ailment: "angry", "impulsive", "schizophrenia", "bipolarity", he told
his parents while he pummeled him with medication. "Ibrahima is unrecoverable. "All this is
false. Ibrahima got out of it thanks to God and his determination, which gave him the courage to
run away when he had the opportunity and to become again what he was, a "normal" young man,
and especially free of drugs.
Today Ibrahima is a computer science student. and peer helper
His story highlights the dangers of over-medication and the codes of psychiatry. It alerts us to the
barbaric practices in force, but also to the fact that those around him are subject to the sacrosanct
medical diagnosis and to the overpowering nature of medicine.
Latest books available in English language:From the shadows to the light (2017),At the dawn of
madness(2020),On the trail of a predestined(2021)