What is Spiritual Abuse and Spiritual Harm?
By Dr. Ingrid Mattson
Spiritual abuse is the misuse of religious knowledge, authority or status to mistreat another person or group of people. Spiritual abuse can be direct, or can be an aspect of, or accompaniment to, another form of abuse.
The greatest form of spiritual abuse is convincing a person that they have no soul, or that they, because of their race or gender or another characteristic, have a deficient or second-class soul. Islam is clear that there is no truth to such claims. Tragically, however, there are some teachers who spiritually abuse believers who seek their mentoring to develop a deeper connection with Allah. These teachers convince their followers that they have no resources for spiritual growth without them; they force their followers to cut off all relationships with their families, former teachers and community leaders; they tell their followers that any disquiet which may arise within their hearts to their leader’s instructions, or rational objection that arises in their minds, is always from Satan or is from their corrupt ego. These spiritually abusive leaders may tell their followers to violate the boundaries of the sacred law and to hide the truth about relationships and activities within the group. This is what I call direct spiritual abuse.
Muslims who have eventually separated from such controlling, manipulative figures share how difficult it is to recover from this abuse. It can take a long time to restore their confidence that Allah created them, like all Children of Adam, with a sound spiritual foundation – the fitra – that can never be destroyed and that they, like any other person, have many healthy ways to reconnect with Allah.
Another form of spiritual abuse is to use religious authority, knowledge or status to enable other forms of abuse, such as physical, emotional, sexual or financial abuse. For example, a scholar asks for donations to build an Islamic institute, but then uses the money for personal enrichment. In this case, the believers who gladly donated may not have asked for the kind of financial transparency that is typical in such projects, because a religious scholar is considered inherently trustworthy. When the scholar escapes accountability by fleeing the country, the donors trust in and respect for religious scholars in diminished, and this prevents them from benefiting as much as they could have from other scholars, and so they have experienced spiritual harm
Another example is an imam who convinces a young female convert to engage in a secret marriage. Because the convert has little knowledge of the shariah, she trusts that the Imam’s explanation of its validity must be correct. When he divorces her a few months later, her joyful entry into the community of Muslims has now been ruined and she may think that the beautiful religion she was told about does not really exist, and so she leaves the religion. We have seen too many cases of such tremendous spiritual harm suffered by new Muslims.
A person does not have to be a religious leader to engage in spiritual abuse. Parents, for example, have authority over their minor children, including to regulate their activities, diet, and social life, and to advise them and correct them when they do wrong. This authority is upheld by the Islam as long as parents are acting in their child’s best interests. Because most parents make great sacrifices for their children, Allah tells us that we should be kind to them, and not speak back to them. But some parents may misquote and misuse the Qur’an or the Sunnah to justify beating or demeaning children. In such cases, in addition to physical or emotional abuse, we see the manifestation of spiritual abuse. If parents misuse the Qur’an to justify any form of abuse, it may result in the child being alienated from the Qur’an, to hate hearing it or even being mentioned. In these cases, then, spiritual abuse is used to rationalize other forms of abuse and can lead to lasting harm upon the child’s spiritual growth and development.
The Muslim community has a collective obligation to ensure justice, fairness, respect, safety and equality within our organizations and communities. Above all, each person in our Muslim spaces has an equal and divinely-conferred inviolability – hurma – of our personhood which must be recognized and prioritized.
