About This Site

Purpose

Our purpose is to educate and empower Muslims around the world to recognize religoius manipulation and stand up to it. We also coach victims of spiritual abuse, those in or with family members in cults, train Muslim professionals, and work with institutions and Islamic leaders to set up procedures for accountability and prevention. For more on our services, including coaching and cult recovery please see our services page.

Our position is that our Islamic institutions and scholars are valuable, necessary, and should be respected.  We affirm the importance of teachers, imams, and community leaders and are only concerned about the abuses of those positions. When religious leaders use their position for personal gain, it harms both the victims and their scholarly role.

 We will work with any sect or religion in this field and will host contributors regardless of faith under the common cause of education or preventing abuse.

This is an independent project to educate and help Muslims about the use of Islam for manipulation, exploitation, and abuse.

Important Note:

We do not work in collaboration with any organizations. Our name has been used to collect stories, and we ask such claims be disregarded. If there is any confusion on this point please contact us directly for clarification at [email protected]

Why We Are Not Naming Names

In Shaykh’s Clothing is an organization dedicated to addressing the roots of spiritual abuse. By providing education, training, and policies we can help people stand up to spiritual abuse, create accountability, and significantly decrease abuse in the community.

 This is a problem that will never go away completely, but we can do our part to create healthy communities that can recognize abuse and maintain checks and balances in the spirit of Allah’s message to assist one another in piety and God-consciousness.

We have stories in which the culprits are not named, however in many of them those immediately effected have been helped.  For those not involved or aware of the incidents, the stories serve as an articulation of the patterns of forms of abuse that occur in the name of Islam.

We also have to maintain due process and lead by example by not granting ourselves self-proclaimed power to accuse by name individuals without evidence to implicate the individual. We do not believe in going public on behalf of others.

Finally, the assumption that people will stay away from religious figures if there are public warnings against them is false. Warnings may confirm keeping a distance to those who would not be attracted to certain figures in the first place, but we find it much more effective to discuss the phenomenon, help those directly affected, and work on prevention.

Is Merely Contributing, Collaborating, or Sharing Panels with Others and Endorsement?

We do not hold the position that merely hosting or being hosted by a guest contributor, collaborating with, or sharing a panel with an individual or a group is an endorsement of that individual or group. We advocate for people to trust themselves and not to look for “safe people” in the sense of turning off their better judgment and circumventing getting to know someone well before trusting them beyond a superficial level.  Everyone must be given a clean slate, but mere associations and relationships should never be viewed as endorsement as expounded upon here.

We will host and work with individuals and groups under the premise that such collaboration is not support of the individual or the group. This includes training and sharing panels with individuals and organizations with whom we have fundamental disagreements. None of these actions are endorsements. We encourage everyone to focus on the content alone.

Furthermore, it is imperative we also speak in organizations where the leaders are abusive, because it may be the only way to get the message of spiritual abuse to congregants. This is especially the case with Sufi-tariqas, where the disciples may not have opportunities to learn about what they may be going through from outside sources. We recognize that merely associating with such figures or organizations may be seen as support, therefore to avoid confusion, we clearly state that such collaboration or associations, in and of themselves, are not support or  endorsements of those individuals or groups.