Tributaries of the Ocean: On the Necessity of Spiritual Mentorship for Muslims

My wife and I recently spent some quality time with religious mentors in our lives. As usual, we were struck by the ways in which they are a clarifying presence in our lives, which we often needlessly complicate. I was reminded of the dire need we have in our communities for people to have access to and be guided by sound living mentors instead of the abstract consumption of content. This makes intuitive sense to anyone who is engaged in any kind of craft: If you want to learn a martial art, you do not do it by reading books or watching videos. You learn it at the hands of a trained master who was trained by someone else and given permission to teach. The knowledge is in the person. If you want to learn to master the kitchen, you may get some knowledge from reading a cookbook or watching Instagram reels. But the subtlety of the knowledge, gaining a sense of refined taste, and an understanding of how to adjust when things go wrong comes by way of learning at the hands of someone like your mother or grandmother. Another example of this is in my own line of work, which is eye surgery. It does not matter how many videos you watch or how much time you spend in the wet lab; it is only under the discerning eye and guiding hand of another trained surgeon that you can learn to independently perform surgery on other people and carefully avoid harming them.

In this recent visit, one of my teachers mentioned in a gathering that there are generally three conduits for a person to get their religion right: structured coursework or classes, individual consistent study, and observing knowledgeable and upright people of piety. You evaluate the third category on the basis of the first two; a person who may initially appear outwardly pious or held in high repute, but is consistently violating the Sacred Law or treating others in a manner which is inconsistent with the Prophetic example should not be taken as a mentor or a guide. This framework is both pragmatic and powerful: The lived example of a guide is anchored in a person’s engagement with sound tradition.

When this framework is neglected and replaced by disembodied content consumption, we walk a perilous road, hopping on a whim from one cobblestone to another instead of in the footsteps of a living guide. The more time I spend in the community, the more I feel that it is inconceivable for Muslims to navigate the difficulties and rapid shifts in their lives without the discerning eye and guiding hand of a spiritual mentor. A person whose epistemic engagement with the religion consists of searching cherry-picked hadiths from hadith websites or consuming inflammatory videos on social media should know that their engagement with Islam is a newly invented methodology and one that is in conflict with the practice of their predecessors. What is also particularly striking to me is how unintuitive this seems to be for people who understand it in other domains: A Muslim surgeon may know that you must learn surgery from another surgeon, but may nevertheless deputize himself to understand and speak on the religion through haphazard internet review. Both lead to harm; they differ in form and scale.

The restoration of a sound framework is thus paramount. Sincere and sustained companionship within a living tradition enriches one’s life and relationships in ways that reflect the civilizational values that the Prophet ﷺ was sent to cultivate. On a personal level, I will say that this relationship with spiritual mentors has brought immense clarity and illumination to the relationship that my wife and I have with each other, but also more generally, to the interpersonal relationships in my local family and beyond. In time, you come to understand that the student-mentor relationship illuminates the relationship between the companions and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ: how he cultivated relationships with them and amongst them, and how he then delegated particular people to go and deal with particular places and contexts to bring people together. You see how and why people committed to organizing their lives and families around him ﷺ and the people that he delegated to take care of them.

When you have sincere, loving mentors, you come to understand the idea that it is possible for someone to love you more than you love yourself. You come to understand how, when a person looks at you, they are capable of seeing the best and most whole version of you. They see the potential of what you are capable of doing, what you may need to rectify in yourself in order to approach that, and how they can gently support you in that endeavor. They are able to help you understand how to endure friction in your interpersonal relationships through love and forgiveness and build an enriching scaffold of human relationships that will buttress you in your hour of need, and vice versa. When all of these things come together, you come to understand better the idea that your spiritual mentors are not simply repositories of knowledge of the fiqh of prayer, or a 24-hour, on-call therapist. Instead, they are lived examples of the sunnah that you had until now only heard but did not witness. They are the discerning eye and guiding hand in your life who will be concerned for you and your ability to walk on your own two feet and live a good life that is pleasing to Allah. You come to understand better the love that the companions around the Prophet ﷺ had for him, and in turn your love for your mentors (or your shaykh) will cause your love for him ﷺ to grow. The truth of the matter is that they are tributaries carrying nourishing water from rivers that themselves flow from the oceanic example of the Prophet ﷺ. May we get, as the poet Imam al-Busiri said, what we seek of handfuls from the sea, or small sips of the drizzle, from the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

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