Holistic Healing: Islam’s Legacy of Mental Health

The Islamic intellectual heritage has long recognized the reality of mental and emotional suffering, and from the time of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and his companions (may Allah be pleased with them) this tradition has cultivated the care of the human psyche. Some Muslims today claim that a true believer cannot suffer from depression, or that such affliction is merely a sign of weak faith remedied by increased prayer. In support of this, some cite the verse, "Indeed, those who believe, do good, establish prayer, and pay alms-tax will receive their reward from their Lord, and there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve" (al-Baqarah 2:277). Yet this understanding misreads the verse. Imam al-Ṭabarī explained that the absence of fear and grief here pertains to the believer's state in the Hereafter—the reassurance that they will not fear the Day of Resurrection nor grieve over what they left behind in the world. Ibn Kathīr concurred with this interpretation. This world, by contrast, is a place of trial, and the believers are told to expect tests in their wealth, their persons, and their health, along with fear, famine, and loss.

These trials befall all of humanity, including the prophets themselves. The Prophet ﷺ taught that Allah tests most severely those He loves most, to strengthen them and cultivate resilience and gratitude. As reported from Saʿd, when the Prophet ﷺ was asked which people face the greatest trials, he replied, "The prophets, then those who follow their path, then those who follow them. A human is afflicted in proportion to their faith; if they are firm in their faith, their trial is increased, but if there is weakness in their faith, their trial is made lighter." Thus greater faith may invite greater trial, not immunity from it. The prophets, whose trust in Allah was unmatched, nonetheless experienced intense emotional hardship. Part of the humanity of the Prophet ﷺ is seen in the struggles he endured. He experienced grief so profound during a year of bereavement that it became known as "the year of sadness," compounded by the financial pressure of the Quraysh's boycott and the pain of the disbelievers' rejection. Allah addressed this grief directly: "Perhaps, then, will you [O Prophet] grieve yourself to death over their denial" (al-Kahf 18:6), and urged him, "So do not grieve yourself to death over them" (Fāṭir 35:8).

The Prophet ﷺ modeled the healthy acknowledgment of emotion. As his son Ibrāhīm lay dying, with tears flowing, he said, "Indeed, the eyes shed tears and the heart feels sorrow. Yet, we do not say anything except that which is pleasing to our Lord. Your departure, O Ibrahim, surely leaves us all deeply saddened." He taught a holistic path to healing that combined spiritual remedies—remembrance of Allah, reframing hardship in light of the Divine Will, and supplications for anxiety and sorrow—with emotional regulation and physical self-care. ʿĀʾishah (may Allah be pleased with her) would prepare talbīnah, a soup of barley, milk, and honey, for grieving relatives, saying she heard the Messenger of Allah ﷺ say, "Talbīnah soothes the heart of the patient and relieves some of his sadness." This was regarded as a medicinal treatment used alongside spiritual remedies, illustrating the holistic nature of Islamic healing. The Prophet ﷺ further encouraged the seeking of all available cures: "Seek cures, O servants of God, for God has placed a cure for every ailment that He has allowed, except for old-age." This spirit catalyzed the development of Islamic medicine and al-ṭibb al-nabawī (Prophetic medicine). It is worth noting that many scholars, such as Ibn Taymiyyah, affirmed the reality of the evil eye, possession by jinn, and magic as genuine influences upon health, yet not all mental affliction traces to such causes, and the Prophetic framing directs Muslims toward spiritual, psychological, and medicinal remedies alike.

This legacy flourished among later scholars. In Baghdad, Muslim and non-Muslim scholars collaborated to preserve and produce knowledge of the psyche. Some, like al-Kindī (d. 873 CE), translated Greek, Persian, and Indian works, filtered them against Islamic theology, and built upon them. In his treatise on repelling sorrows, al-Kindī drew directly upon the Qur'anic phrase, "so that you do not grieve over what you have missed out on" (al-Ḥadīd 57:23). Others grounded themselves first in revelation, as did Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1350 CE), who proposed a staged theory of cognition drawn from Qur'anic terms and affirmed in his Ighāthat al-Lahfān that diseases of the heart such as anxiety, sadness, and anger may be treated by addressing their root cause, since "the heart is harmed by what harms the body and vice versa." Al-Balkhī (d. 934 CE), in his Maṣāliḥ al-Abdān wa-al-Anfus, urged his readers to take psychological illness as seriously as physical illness, refining descriptions of depression, anxiety, phobias, and obsessive-compulsive disorder that closely match modern diagnostic criteria. He attributed such conditions variously to black bile, to the whispers of Shayṭān, or both, urging treatment regardless of the presumed cause and reminding readers that "for every illness God has created a cure."

This heritage extended to institutions. Psychiatric wards emerged in the Muslim world roughly five centuries before Europe, the earliest evidence being the care of psychiatric patients at al-Fusṭāṭ Hospital in Cairo (872–3 CE). From the tenth century, healing centers known as dār al-shifāʾ or māristāns arose across the Muslim world. Positioned centrally to remain accessible and to encourage the Sunnah of visiting the ill, they were designed with attention to air quality and clean water. Treatment combined medications—including early antidepressants called mufarriḥ al-nafs—with holistic therapies such as Qur'anic recitation, soothing sounds, bathing, balanced diets, cupping, massage, and immersion in nature. Discharged patients even received financial support to ease their reintegration, earning Islamic medicine the description "humanistic medicine."

This legacy was later interrupted. Today, despite elevated risk, Muslims tend to underutilize mental health services, distrusting modern psychology, avoiding medication, and fearing judgment from providers, so that many suffer in silence. This owes partly to a general drift from religion and the loss of the integrated healing tradition, and partly to colonial and secular forces that divided the Muslim world and displaced its intellectual contributions. When Mohamed Ali came to power in Egypt, he installed foreign, French-speaking instructors, inserting barriers between Egypt and Arabic scholarship and undermining confidence in combining rational and revelatory sources. As modern psychology's secular roots opposed the Islamic worldview, mistrust grew, and mental illness came increasingly to be seen as purely spiritual, raising the stigma against seeking care.

Yet Islamic history nurtured mental health across generations, producing the discipline of ʿilm al-nafs (the study of the self). Its holistic model, most famously articulated by Imam al-Ghazālī, placed the heart at the center, linking mind, body, soul, and emotion. Muslim scholars concluded that mental illness is multifactorial—shaped by biology, heredity, environment, and spirituality—and therefore did not reduce it to weakness of faith, nor prescribe prayer alone, but combined medicine, talk therapy, and spiritual remedies. To move forward, we must recover this heritage, confront the stigma now present in our communities, and stand upon the shoulders of the scholars who came before us to carry their legacy onward.