When I began this work, I believed I was addressing sexual health for Muslims. And I was. I spent 17 years developing curricula, training educators, holding space for difficult conversations, and helping Muslim communities navigate topics that had been pushed to the margins or avoided altogether.

But somewhere along the way—through my studies in Islamic Psychology, through my own healing journey, through writing a book that centers Islamic traditions of the soul for sexual health, and most recently through completing Level 2 Shifaa Method training—I began to see something I couldn't unsee.

My work has naturally focused on the soul. It's the direction I've been pulled in, the depth I've been called to explore. And now, I need to deepen even further.

Sexual health issues aren't just sexual health issues.

They're doorways. They're invitations. They're the surface ripples of something much deeper happening beneath—in the qalb, the heart, the very center of our soul.

I’ve been sitting with something uncomfortable lately—something I didn’t expect to feel so strongly as I approached my book’s preorder date. Soulful Sexual Health for Muslims is the first of its kind, and that should feel exciting, right? And yet, as I think about how to share this with the world—how to promote it, how to invite people into its pages—I feel stuck. Not because I don’t believe in it. I do. I believe in it with every part of me. But because the usual approach to marketing a book doesn’t fit. I didn’t write this book from a place of strategy or sales funnels. I wrote it from the depth of my soul, from years of holding pain—mine and others’—and from a quiet, determined commitment to keep doing the inner work.

So the question I’ve been asking myself is: How do I promote something that isn’t just a book, but a reflection of my own journey?

There’s a growing movement to make therapy more accessible and accepted in Muslim communities—a long overdue effort to break the stigma around mental health. But in the rush to validate therapy within an Islamic framework, one model has taken center stage almost unquestioned: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Praised for its practicality and intellectual appeal, CBT has become the go-to modality in Muslim clinical spaces. But what if, in our effort to make therapy seem familiar, we’ve unknowingly distanced ourselves from the heart of our own tradition? This article explores the deeper costs of centering CBT in Muslim mental health—and invites us back to a soul-rooted, spiritually honest model of healing.

The following are six nuanced points that Muslims must keep in mind with regards to soulful marital sexual intimacy, and why Muslim struggle with it, for legitimate reasons.