 a mother, a wife, a mother, a daughter. And we don't want to, as soon as we put addict in that, that's all we see. So we're seeing the addiction and we've now kind of intertwined the person and their struggle into one box. And that's, again, not what we want to do. Instead, we want to see the individual as an individual who is struggling. And as soon as you kind of orient the term addict, that also has negative consequences for individuals who do struggle. Because then they might, if as a community, we're not seeing them beyond their struggle, well, why should they? And I ask us to really think about that question. Why should they see themselves as anything but an addict if that's all the community's gonna see as well? And so I'll just briefly talk about the Stanford Muslim Mental Health and Islamic Psychology lab, inshallah. So it's a team under the directorship of Dr. Rania Awed, who will join us shortly. And mashallah, it is a growing, massive team doing incredible work. Currently, our team is made up of about 40 research interns. We have seven senior consultants within the lab, and we have about 10 interns. And so when we look at the addiction line in the lab and where that all really started, in the past, we have one of our biggest lines of research in the lab right now. And I hope that a lot of you guys are aware of some of the work that the lab is doing is on the topic of suicide, which we know is another taboo topic within our community. And so as we navigated the research within the suicide line, and I remember, and actually, as we were doing one of our projects, we were in a meeting with an imam from a community and he said, suicide is but one problem that we as a community are struggling with. What about addiction? Who's talking about addiction? And I need support to help acquaint my community in understanding this topic. And so that really led a few of us in the lab like, okay, we should really start talking about this and what better place to do it than a research academic lab where we can produce empirical research to our community that really talks about the gravity of the situation. Beyond that, we're still in the COVID-19 pandemic and we did see there was an increase in substance use and addiction and opioid use more specifically as well during the pandemic. So again, as researchers in the lab, we're like, somebody has to talk about this and that really led to where we are now. And we currently have three projects that are active within the lab itself. So one of them and that's the one I'll be presenting on today after Dr. Arianna is our narrative literature review which really, I'll talk more about the paper but in brief it looked at all over the world, Muslim populations, Muslim countries and what's going on in those countries in terms of addiction and substance use. How are they treating it? What are their perceptions of it? So we really wanted to understand the state of the literature before we started to produce our own literature. We're also developing an addiction community response manual and this is catered and aimed towards Muslim community leaders. So all community leaders. And again, that's really to make sure that the knowledge that the community has, the perception that the community has and the approach we take in talking about this topic is real, is accurate and is most up to date so that we are not endangering anybody further and we are making sure that the terminology like I went over earlier is up to date and accurate as well as there's actionable steps for community members to take as we navigate the situations with certain community members or as we just even working towards prevention in schools and stuff like that. Lastly, we wanted to do a paper on the Islamic ethics of substance use and addiction. Of course we are the Muslim Mental Health and Islamic Psychology Lab. Islam is a big part of a lot of the work that we do and it's mainly, we're all on Muslim populations rather and so it was really important for us to produce a paper that really outlined well what's the Islamic perspective on this topic and how does that work and kind of correlate into the scientific research that we'll be viewing in more detail. So Insha'Allah, I'll end here and I'm gonna do a handoff to Dr. Arianna who will walk us through her part of the presentation and then I'll be back Insha'Allah. Thank you. We're getting to my slides now. That was really, so I'm new to this community and so it was really nice to, here I haven't learned that much about, I didn't know that Stanford had a Muslim lab so that's amazing. I'm coming from Florida and we have communities but I never thought we would have a Muslim lab at Stanford, we are so blessed. That's really cool. I'm excited for this to expand. Okay, so let's talk about, you know, what I said in the beginning, Islamic approach to, so I put some extra objectives. You know, I think I just love objectives. I even put the objectives first, let's do. It's good to be focused. So I'm gonna review what I talked about in the last presentation for those of you who haven't seen the presentation yet. I'm gonna discuss the medical perspective because, you know, I just, I can't help that. That's my job. You know, that's the way I think about a lot of this. So you'll get a sense of the way and I am very open about it. Very transparent about how a doctor thinks about all of this because a lot of people are not too, a lot of us are not too far off from how the medical community is thinking about it, honestly. Then we're gonna go into medical tools. I'm going to talk about the 12 step program and then, of course, I love to connect everything to the Islamic tradition. You know, Islam has been a guiding force in my life and it's such a beautiful religion. It's so nuanced and so sophisticated. It can be, you know, and depending on the way you practice. And so I will try to reflect as much as I can during this presentation. Thank you. So just to review the cycle of addiction, we have the intoxication phase, the person, and this can apply after the 10th time the person has used the substance or this can be the first time the person has used the substance. But usually the intoxication is that immediate surge, that euphoria, that feel good. And the question is, does this happen to everybody? No, it doesn't happen to everybody. The person who has the disease or the predisposition will have an amazing type of a euphoria that can become something that feels sort of like a medicine for them. I've heard people talk about, well, it helps me with mood, it helps me with sleep. I felt normal for once in my life. So that's what happens in the intoxication phase. And that is a reinforcing that, when we get between the intoxication and the negative withdrawal, we got a reinforcement happening. The negative or withdrawal phase is the crash after the substance. So, you know, what must go, what is that saying? What must go up must come down. So that's what happens is just as well, just as how good that felt, that what follows is a terrible feeling. And if the person uses frequently enough, it can be depression. It can be irritability, restlessness, discontentment. And so the person doesn't like that state. The brain doesn't like that state and it wants to seek a way out. So then we get to craving. Or the preoccupation phase. And that's the cycle. That's what feeds it. We can go to the next one. So addiction is a pervasive disease. It's a disease of the mind, body, and the spirit. The effects can extend to family members, friends. It can affect communities. It travels through generations. It is a serious disease. And there are signs. There are signs when it happens early and I'm gonna get into that. And there are also signs a community has when it is stricken with this disease. It's just like a body. One thing I wanna just reflect on is when I see a community that is incredibly ashamed or does not wanna talk about it, the more they try to hide it, oftentimes that's a sign that it's pretty, it's pretty diseased. One of the things that I like about that I've learned from the Islamic tradition, the wisdom that runs through it, is that traditionally it's, we look at yin and yang quite a bit. And so oftentimes two extremes are part of the same coin. So I'm going to touch on this throughout my presentation and I've sort of utilized that through my practice in addiction medicine. And so in my last presentation, I did touch on oftentimes the people who you look in your community and you think are the lowest. And I've heard this with members, you know everyone, I mean this happens in all communities but I've heard from Muslim communities, sometimes I talk to Muslims and they say, I don't want to go to 12 step meetings because I don't want to be with those people. I'm not one of those people. There's this perception that they're low people, homeless people, dirty people, trashy people, okay. Which is a, it's a misconception. But oftentimes the people who are struggling with the most difficult things, in it for example, addiction, are the people who have the most potential. These can be saints, these can be friends of God. That's what I'm trying to say. These are the people who can have the most potential for being the best in our communities. And I've talked to enough people who've been recovered who I've seen that and I have taken those people as my closest friends in terms of developing myself spiritually because they have this wisdom and they have this presence in their mountains. And I'm just amazed, these are miracles. These are walking miracles. But they're hidden. And one thing that can hide them is something like this, is addiction. And so if we're able to get to them, if we're able to treat them well and create a community of tolerance and gentleness and non-judgementalness, then we can help to bring these people out and allow them to assume their place in our communities as the leaders and as the mountains that they are. So anyway, I must get off track. Okay, the path. Okay, so this is a very important slide for me. I kind of broke down the way that I see that addiction tends to go. So it's a very serious disease, like I said. And when we look at cancer, some certain types of cancer, they're terminal diagnoses, right? I hope that our country and our communities can look at disease as serious as that as well. It can be, or the way that I think about it when I approach my patients and I see some of the most severe people, I see people in the hospital, it can be a terminal illness. And so, you know, the approaches that I use are to try to prevent that from progressing, but the final destination is death if it's not controlled. So the first stage or the sort of what happens to a person who has this disease and it's not controlled and it progresses is they'll, you know, you'll start to see this type of person or they will experience cravings. The cravings turn into a type of denial. The denial progresses. It becomes a type of denial that I don't have a problem. Now, is this only people with addiction? No, it can also affect people without addiction. I'm sure some of us have people, family members in our communities who have their own medical conditions or even their own problems and behaviors that they're not willing to look at and you're trying to get them to look at it and they won't or they don't seem to make sense in what they say. They have terrible, let's say, diabetes and they are having health problems because of their diabetes and they're not taking their medication and they're getting more and more health problems. I think we've all, some of us, one of us have seen that, so. And that's an example of denial. So with somebody who has serious addiction as it progresses, or sometimes even in the early stage, you'll see that they are just somebody who has a lot of denial. So once you get into the denial, which is a type of not being able to see clearly, a type of covering, which, by the way, we all have an element of that. That's part of our path in life. That's part of the reason we're here is to get out of that. But then you get to a loss of spirituality. So the first thing to go is spirituality. Then a result of losing the spirituality is a deception. The person will, when you have really bad denial, you are in a sense deceiving yourself when that gets worse. You're deceiving others. It can be through lying, which is a milder form, or it can get into hiding, hiding the substance, living a double life, that can turn into problems at work, problems with the job, problems with people. As that progresses, you get to a loss of morality. So loss of spirituality, loss of morality. When right and wrong are no longer prominent in your mind or the way that you structure your life, then you develop increasing problems as a result of that. So lots of problems, which contribute to lots of stresses which, in turn, makes the person, can actually make the person go more to the substances. And then as a result of these problems, you get the development of, now you start to get the injury to the body. So it can, just at the earliest stages, be psychological. So anxiety, depression, these are both very common in poor sleep. These are the three things I always ask all my patients about, which they all have, at least one of those. Then, as that progresses, and you're not doing anything about it, the physical health starts to go. So this is where we see people in the hospital. So the loss of physical health, oftentimes as the hospital, the loss of morality, we'll see, not all the time, but some people will, in the jail settings, is where I'll see some of that as well. And then as the physical health progresses, now as you can see, this person is at the end of the spectrum, right? So oftentimes the disease has progressed to the point that I am very, I feel very happy if I'm able to get through to the person at that point. Like I said, I work in the hospital, so everybody I see is at that point. And I try to, in order to motivate them, I employ motivational enhancement techniques. And in order to motivate them, I will pull on, okay, your physical health is impacted. This is how your physical health is impacted. Your psychological health has been impacted. What do you wanna do? I'm very straightforward. I don't beat around the bush. And sometimes that's the first time they hear that. Does that mean that no one has told them that before? No, but sometimes I'm effective in intervening at that point. If the person doesn't get better at that point, then they're heading towards death. So if it's in terms of alcohol, it can be liver cirrhosis. In terms of other substances, it can be infections. Actually, one of the biggest ways that death happens is actually as a result of the accidents or violence, assaults, or just getting into being in dangerous situations that contribute to the death. And so that's an unfortunate end to the cycle. And that's why I share this with you. And that's what I think, this is what I think about. This is pretty much a summary of how I see this unfold and how progressive and persuasive it is. So the three most important points from this slide, loss of spirituality, loss of morality, and then loss of physical health. Now, if the person chooses to recover, it actually improves, it goes backwards. So they will recover everything in the reverse direction. So, and I should have put an arrow to go the other way to represent that, but once they abstain from the substance, then their physical health starts to improve. Then the mood disorders start to improve. Then the problems start to decrease. Then they start to get a sense of building the morality back. The morality comes back. They are having less problems with people. And then finally, the spirituality comes back. The spirituality is usually sort of a little bit more of the challenging thing, because if the person doesn't work in themselves the appropriate way, they can sort of get a little bit stuck at the, sometimes at the morality part, or sometimes before that they may get involved or get a different addiction. So sometimes that can be work, that can be addiction to other people, which we call codependency. And what was I thinking? I lost my train of thought. Anyway, it's fascinating. So physical health, morality, and spirituality is the last one. And what I tell my patients is I would like you to fully get the complete treatment, because once you get the spirituality it's an amazing way of life. That thirst that you have is the thirst for spirituality. And once you find that, you have a new sense of life. You're happy, joyous, and free, as they say, in the 12 steps. And that's where we all want to be, but I've seen people come out of the 12 step groups because I've been going to the 12 step programs meetings for about six years now. And I see them just having something that is just you see it and you want it too. And that's where I would like all my patients to get to. And a lot of them are actually able to find that and reach that through working with themselves, which I'll get into a little bit later. I know I spent a lot of time on this slide, but I love this slide. I think it's a great thing to remember when you think about addiction. Okay, so now into the boring medical part. So facilities, okay, so treatment settings. There's two types of treatment settings when we approach addiction. There's a facility, so the hospital or the rehab, which is usually the things that we think of. And then there's programs outside of the facilities. And those encompass partial hospitalizations, intensive outpatient, I'm just listing what's on here, outpatient services and aftercare. So the most intensive, if you wanna go to the next slide, is the facilities. So the hospital is where somebody will come in for medical problems as a result of their withdrawal or acute withdrawal that's unstable. So I'm oftentimes doing that when I do the hospital work. The other situation that the hospital will be required for is co-occurring psychiatric disorder that can impair treatment that needs to be addressed as well. So these are the most acute people. And so oftentimes hospital is not a choice. You can't say, I want to get clean, I'm gonna go to the hospital. That's not the best thing to do unless you absolutely require it. And that is when these, basically these conditions are met. The other option is detox units, which are parts of the rehab. So if you can go to the next slide, that's the rehab. So you can check yourself into a detox unit, but rehab settings can, so there's the detox unit and then rehab settings tend to be attached to the detox unit. And sometimes people, if they check themselves in, they'll go through detox or go through withdrawal and then just as part of the flow, the workflow, they go into rehab. But what I'll do is I'll sometimes send patients from the hospital to a rehab. And I say this person needs rehab, they can't go home. And the conditions in which I say that are when there's a high risk for them relapsing and in summary, going home is dangerous for them. So it could be that they are unstable in certain ways that would make them dangerous to themselves or others. Or the home environment is not a good environment for recovery if they live alone, for example. And their immediate support system is using drugs or is not available and there's drugs at home. The other situation is if they have all of this going on and then they're still in the contemplative phase or they are having issues with employment and transportation and they don't have a job. And so all of this can worsen, of course, their recovery, contribute to that unstable environment. So before I went into this profession, I didn't really know what rehab was like. And so I'm sure some of you are interested to know what is it like to be in rehab? Well, rehab is 24-hour care and monitoring. It's in a facility that is really not a lot like a hospital. It may sound like it, but they're all a little bit different in their style. But it's not like you're hooked up to a machine like in a hospital and you have nurses attending you constantly. It's more of a facility where there's special attention paid to therapies and it's intensive therapies. So if I have a patient who I'm not sure is going to be able to engage in intensive therapy and meets that criteria of being unsafe, then you put them in a facility and then there's the groups. So the groups they can access there. And oftentimes it's groups. There's also individual therapy mixed in as well. They'll have a therapist assigned to them and a case worker, social worker. The groups tend to be based on the 12 step model. It can sometimes vary between facilities. And there's also a stress on developing healthy coping mechanisms for the person and preparing them to return back to society. Because with this type of a disease, especially if it's severe and has progressed to affecting, especially affecting the physical health, the person's brain is no longer able to function like a normal, healthy brain. So in the midst of all that, the patient can actually lose social skills. And once they become recovered, they really don't know how they can have trouble relating to people. Some people, they come out of home environments where they never developed adequate social skills. And so that may be something that was needed a long time ago that they can get in this setting. Also, just as a side note, severe mental illnesses like psychosis can also do the same thing. So oftentimes people who especially go through something as stressful and as traumatic to the brain as psychosis will also have trouble relating to people and getting back into the flow of our busy industrial lives so it can benefit them as well. So, and now we're into the outpatient programs. The partial hospitalization is, this is outpatient, but it's just intensive outpatient. So they have to attend quite frequently the activities in the program. And this is usually groups. They will also have, I know with the organization I work with they also, this is all run by therapists. So they will also be assigned to a therapist as well and they'll have individual therapy. So it'll be similar to rehab, but they won't be living there and with other people the whole time. Intensive outpatient is fewer hours. It's more than nine hours a week. It's not, it's more intensive than that. That might have been a typo, but it's in a structured program. Betty Ford has a really good intensive operation program. I worked with them last year and my patients really like that one. Then we have outpatient services. The person will see an addiction medicine doctor or a physician and then they'll also attend groups around education. Sometimes it'll be group counseling and I mean, not sometimes it will be group counseling, but it'll vary on the model. So I've seen the groups in these cases led by therapists, you know. And actually in all of these settings they can oftentimes be led by a professional, but also in some cases it'll be straight up AA or NA meetings too. And then harm reduction. So outpatient services will also target people who are still using and they're in the contemplative phase. And so what they'll do is they'll try to provide them education on how to avoid complications of use. And that also employs a type of motivational therapy with the goal of eventually getting the person to abstain. So when somebody has a severe use disorder in most cases they shouldn't use anymore. In a mild use disorder, in some cases, it's very rare, but in some cases people may be able to, you know, when it comes to substances like alcohol or cannabis, they, you know, the doctor may work with them to try to get them to use more healthily. I don't, if somebody has a use disorder I don't really find this a good idea, but that, I'm just telling you that sometimes that happens as well. And then afterwards, after they complete the program they'll follow up with a addiction medicine doctor. And that's called follow up. Current medical treatment, the summary 50, I always tell my patients 50% of the treatment is medication for those on the severe end, and sometimes on the moderate end too. And then the other 50% are the therapies. A lot of people with the people that I talk to they're not so into the therapies and I sometimes have to work with them to get them to be able to do that. So the medications that we have available are mainly used to block cravings and also block the high of the drug. I read somewhere that actually in Native American tradition they also employed medications to do this similar thing for people in their, this is way before colonialism, which I found fascinating. So, and we have two forms that we have pills and then we have injectable forms. The injectable forms last longer, the pills have to be taken every day. If I have somebody who is on the severe end I try as much as possible to opt for injectables because the minute the person decides to skip a pill it's over, pretty much. With the therapies, the biggest resistance is that the patient doesn't want to be around other people. That's normally the initial resistance I get. From some of the people I've talked in the Muslim community it's the same thing. So we share this, it doesn't matter being Muslim or not Muslim, it's all the same across the board. And this disease thrives on isolation. I would almost say that it's a disease of isolation. So if I have somebody who's doing all the therapies but they are staying home or they tell me I've decided to work out more and I work more that's not a good sign for me. That doesn't mean that they can completely, they can be functional or have productive lives but that's not 100% of the treatment. That's not completing full treatment. And once you give up the substance that doesn't mean that you have the hallmark signs of somebody who's been affected by addiction which is irritability, discontentment and restlessness. So someone might be thinking when they hear this, well, I have that too. Well, yes, you may. That can be a sign of, you may know somebody or you may have a family member who has addiction, you may have it in your family. Most people do have had some family member with the disease and when it is not addressed or treated the spiritual disease does travel and it does spread and these are the signs of that. And the only way that it can be treated is with the spiritual medicine. For some people that spiritual medicine is very bitter. You want to isolate, you want to hide but what do we say about medicine? Sometimes the medicine that tastes the worst is the one that you need. So the treatment for that is doing the opposite of that is to be with other people but there's more to that. It's not just being with other people, you have to be with the right people and the right setting. So I'm gonna get to that next. Most of the therapies, what I referred to in the other slide, they are based on the 12 step model. And what happens is, what I tell patients is that you either do a structured program or you can attend 12 step meetings and I'll talk with them about a way to approach 12 step meetings. But what I wanted to comment on in this slide is that the treatment doesn't just stop with the patient. They have to come home, right? So when they come home, what kind of a home are they coming to? If they are living with others, the others can't just go about with their lives. This is something that requires treatment, the spiritual medicine for the whole family. And I would say beyond to that, to add to that, it's the community, the community needs it too. This picture is representative of how I see this disease a little bit is I don't know if my first generation people remember the movie Fern Gully with Hexis. So the way I see Hexis is like this force that grows and grows and grows by sucking off the, the sucking and feeding off the toxins, the pollutants in the environment. And then he just becomes this monster spirit that represents pollution and that just can actually do physical harm. So, and the fairies in the rainforest fight him with light and goodness. So it's a, it's a movie that I had in my childhood. And that's how I see this, is that it feeds off toxicities and we're not talking about pollution, but you can have spiritual toxins as well, spiritual toxicities. So we're gonna get into the treatment for that. That has been, that has the treatment from 12 steps. So that has been used to approach that. So the first question is, why is the 12 step approach so widely used? I mean, that is something we can't deny. It's used in, as you saw, the professional settings in more structured programs. And then it's still around and it has quite a bit of attendance in this country and around the world. So one of the reasons is that there's a, it's group led. So it's not dependent on one kind of, one person to be there. It's not dependent on having a professional there or an organization. And it creates the sense of self-sufficiency. So let's say that we have a community that's in pain and they have to rely on one person to lead a meeting. So what happens if that one person has something that comes up? They have a family emergency, they get sick. What happens to the recovery and the treatment of that community? Now they're dependent on one person who is now not there. So it's just, it's not a sustainable model. So that's what makes this approach probably the best, maybe I shouldn't say the best. It's the most favorite approach because it's just, it's so easy in that respect. Then it does garner a sense of self-awareness. Healthy self-governance is another focus of it, which means being able to take care of yourself and being a sustainable person. So people who tend to have active addiction or even a history of addiction want to be taken care of. That's a big characteristic or quality. And so it's very easy for that kind of a mentality to fall into what are called codependent relationships which are a form of unhealthy relationships. Taking care of somebody, and notice I say taking care, not giving care, but taking care of somebody is feeds, unfortunately feeds, and I can talk about this. This can be a whole other lecture, but it can unfortunately compromise their recovery and worsen the addiction. These types of relationships can also fuel just unhealthy behaviors and also certain kinds of mental illnesses and even just diseases. It can lead to poor outcomes across a lot of different situations. There's also the end goal is the spirituality and humility. I start humility because all of these characteristics we can find in our religion and in religious traditions and you can read a book about, a lot of books about garnering these qualities, whether it's through purifying the nuffs or maintaining an intensive way of life that's focused around not only the five daily prayers but doing the extra prayers, reading a lot of Quran, attending a lot of lectures. We have quite a few people in our community actually who are doing that and it's great. But these are qualities that I just have to say this because you can't get this from a book. There's no way that you can get a little taste of it, but you cannot will yourself to attain the type of spirituality and humility that gets you to levels that produce this sense of, that gets you highly close to God without taking into account your company and your environment. I'm not saying it's impossible, but there are people who want to isolate themselves and stay home and read and that's how they want to change and it just doesn't work that way. That's not what we were put on the planet for. We were not put here to isolate ourselves and to stay in our homes and to read books the whole time. You know, our nature is to interact with others. We're social animals and whether we like it or not, we absorb what is around us. We are affected by our environments and even if you decide to stay away, you're living with somebody and you decide to physically stay away from them, if you are in the same vicinity of that person, you will be affected by their state. So you can be affected by the state of your neighborhood. So these are important things to take into account and if you're trying to be the best person that you can be and I'm sure there are people who are doing that and doing all the right things, but you are not interacting with people who are intensely willing to look at themselves seriously and be honest, then you're not gonna get anywhere and you're going to have those feelings of irritability, discontent and restlessness and I'll tell you that I've met a lot of, and I mean, this is personal experience, okay? I have had the experience of trying to do as much as I could physically to feel a certain way, to feel the sense of iman and peace and it just, you can end up getting tired in the end. So there has to be a balance and if you have family members, I'm sure there are family members or people who are saying, well, okay, I'll just try to encourage and join good and forbid evil with my family members and get them to change and that's not, unfortunately, I think there are quite a few people who know this, someone will listen more to people outside telling them something than the family member, okay? So if you've been living with this person for a long period of time or you grew up with them, it's, you're just draining yourself and you're focusing on something that does not need that focus. The focus should be on yourself and growing and looking at yourself and if you think that you don't need to work on yourself and that you're fine, then we have a problem. We have a problem here. So an important announcement. You may still have an addiction problem even if you're able to quit the substance or behavior for a period of time. I just have, this was something that came up while I was working on this presentation is I have people say, well, I'm not, and they'll use the word addict because that word is still in a lot of people's minds and people who have any form of addiction are incredibly ashamed and know that they're, when you're able to start to get them in recovery, the word addict is in their minds all the time. So even when I'm trying to catch somebody who I suspect has an addiction, they'll say I'm not addicted because I was able to quit for two months or I can quit for a week. That, and Mona touched on this, is that the problem, what we call addiction is when you have continued, you have problems in your life and you're still continuing to use. And that is, that can be fueled by denial, denial which can affect anybody, not just the person with the addiction and we have to be aware of that. And it really is a lack of honesty with oneself. So I, this is an important topic because we all have some form of denial. If you had no denial, then I don't, I think you would be immediately taken up to heaven and just be an angel. And the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, did comment on something like this when someone came to him. And so, this is a process for all of us and some people just, it's very, very hard. It's, they can, looking at themselves, it can take years for some people to even approach that. And we have to, when we see that driving at them or pushing them is only going to make it harder for them. We have to be, we have to be able to be gentle and tolerant and let people, let it unfold and let people come to it naturally without pushing them and without driving it down. If you can go to the next slide. So this brings me to the 12 steps and I want to talk about the 12 steps and how it was formed before I get into, into talking more about it. So the 12 steps, the story starts with the Oxford group which was founded in early 1900s. And it was Christian-based. It was designed to recapture Christian enthusiasm and it was also designed with the goal for spiritual growth. It was led by an evangelical priest. So Bill Wilson, a businessman who was in Connecticut, he had an alcohol problem and he was constantly going in and out of the hospital and he was relapsing. And somebody told him about this Oxford group so he started to go and he's still relapsed. So on one of his relapses where he was in the hospital he had this spiritual realization and he thought, I need to, why don't I start actually sharing about my use? And so he did because obviously people at that time were not sharing about there. It's something that you're ashamed of and you want to hide so you don't want to talk about the alcohol or substance problem. So when he started to go to the meetings he would share with anybody he could see or know about his struggle with alcohol. While on a business trip and it helped, it helped him not go back to alcohol. So while he was on a business trip he was connected to a surgeon who was named Bob, Bob Smith and he also had an alcohol problem and he was constantly relapsing of course. So they decided to meet with each other and share there and Bill was having such a great, just was so excited that he hadn't gone back to alcohol that he wanted to have Bob join him in this. And so they met together. This was outside of these Oxford group meetings. They met together and they shared about their experiences. And Bob, who was notorious alcoholic, unable to recover serious consequences, I mean, it was going in a direction where he would lose his job, was able to stop drinking, which is a very big deal because in that time they didn't have any drugs or medications. So it was a very desperate time for both, for Bob and at some point Bill. Then as a result of that, they, alcoholics anonymous was formed. So they formed this group and they decided to take any Christian elements to take the religious part out of it. They wanted it to be an organization that would welcome people of any creed, denomination, religion. And with the goal of getting people sober, that's the number one goal. And one of my friends I was talking to who's about 30 plus years in recovery was telling me that there is this story of a transgender person who came to a meeting. And the people at the meeting, this was around the time that Bill and Bob had, not too long after Alcoholics Anonymous was formed. And the people in the meeting, given the time period were freaking out. And they said, what do we do about this person? There's a person here, a man here who's dressed in women's clothes. And they asked Bill and Bill said, well, do they want to get sober? And they said yes. And he says, then welcome him in. So this organization was a huge success and it experienced quite a bit of growth. This is the longest running program that we have in our country, now with more than two million members as of 2010. There was also an AA big book that was written, which is sort of like a kind of a guide to understanding alcoholism and going into recovery. So you can go to the next slide. Just, it's gonna take a while to go through all these, but these are the 12 steps. These are what the programs are built around. The first one is we admitted we were powerless over, and you can insert anything over there, substance, person, or behavior. The Al-Anon groups will say pretty much the same thing. It's basically targeted for alcohol. So over alcohol is usually what's said, but that can be really any substance. And that the lives have become unmanageable. Two, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. Three, made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. And as we understood him as an important life-saving type of an excerpt in the steps because there are people who come in who, like we talked about when we, I mentioned the path to addiction, who have lost the spirituality and the morality. They, there are people who do not believe in God. And one of the ways that, one of my friends told me that they'll approach people who can't, who don't believe in anything, is they'll say, well, do you believe in this doorknob? Do you believe, you can see the doorknob. Do you believe it exists? And they'll say, well, yes. Then believe in that for now. That's the wisdom in that. So do you see how this is a different approach? It's not, okay, well, if you can't believe in God, you're not, you don't come here. Or your God is this. You have to believe in this. This is, it's meeting people where they are at. And that's what I love about what I've seen and experienced through this, you know? There are some places where, like at the end of the AA meetings, they will use the Lord's Prayer. There are, they have literature and they will take some, some excerpts from the New Testament. And, but these will, they, these will mention God. They don't mention Jesus or Christ. They try to eliminate any religious connotation. So I have not seen any of that when I've gone through the literature. And what I was told is that the Lord's Prayer isn't necessarily the prayer that has to be had at the end of the meetings. They also have something called the Serenity Prayer, which is what I said in the beginning, which made a reference to God. And I, you know, God, Allah, for me personally, those are the two things, the same two things. God is a very beautiful word. It's an English word. But we can call God upon many names. And, you know, I use God and Allah interchangeably. And I have friends in recovery who they're the God of their understanding, which is none of my business, by the way. But they have told me, I've been surprised by what they've told me about the God of their understanding. Some people, it's Jesus. You know, some people, it's other things. But there are also people who've said, the God of my understanding is the creator of the universe. It's the creator. So that's what I believe my God is. Is it any of my business, really, what they choose to call God anyway? No. But does that mean it's bad? Does that mean that I have to turn this off and not be a part of this? No, I see some wisdom and I see that I can learn some things from this. If I keep it based on and focused on spirituality and where the similarities are. So as the steps continue to go, there is, I'm gonna try to finish up, there is an area where there's an inventory done and that there's an encouragement of maintaining conscious contact with God. And what I love about this is there's people who've taken this seriously and who've worked through this. And they've done the inventory on themselves. So looking through the resentments in their life. And at the very end of that, what was my contribution to these resentments? All of these are healing activities. Resentments are a terrible fuel for addiction and not just addiction, but a lot of other diseases as well. And so this type of an honest inventory that you do with another person called a sponsor can be incredibly freeing and incredibly healing because it's taking the shame, it's coming out of the shadows. And it's talking about what you consider to be the worst secrets that you've ever seen. And I've done these myself. I did all of these 12 steps. I worked them in the program. I've worked the traditions of this program as well. And it has only made me stronger in my faith and stronger in my religion. And I've gotten the amazing gift of meeting people who are spiritual mountains. So the 12 step recovery programs are intended for anyone. Anonymity is highly stressed. It's talked about at every meeting. You cannot talk about what you see here, who you see here, what you hear here when you leave here, let it stay here. It's said at every meeting. There's a stress on mentorship. There's readings and workbooks that are available. There is the working of the 12 steps through an inventory process. At the end of it, there is an encouragement of service work towards others. Which is a very good medicine for people who have active history of addiction. Because addiction tends to make the person constantly think about themselves the whole time. Everything revolves around them. It's just part of the disease. It's part of the frontal lobe being damaged. And the medicine for them is to start thinking about others, start thinking outside of yourself. And that's where they're able to get better. Meetings can be held anywhere. They can be held in gyms, offices, parks, community centers. I've been to some meetings in churches. The meetings use the churches because they say the rent is low. And actually someone came to me and asked me if our mosque in Florida would be open to holding a Allen on meetings. And well, I'll get into that. But that did happen. So we'll go to the next slide. Other support groups followed. Also we had AA that started. Then we've gotten to Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine and Anonymous, Marijuana. I mean, look at all of these. They have a group for everybody, I guess. And there's also Allen on and Alatine, which is for families or children who have been affected by alcoholism. This doesn't necessarily mean having a loved one who has alcoholism, but it can also be extremely significantly affected by a friend or if you're working with patients with addiction, that's another qualifier. Smart recovery was also something that followed. It's not quite 12-step related. There's more of a reliance on self-empowerment, building and maintaining motivation, coping with urges, managing thoughts, feelings and behaviors. When I saw this, it reminded me of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a type of therapy we employ in our patients. And it focuses on triggers, thought patterns, coping mechanisms, current stress coping mechanisms, because the drug will interfere with how the brain copes with stress. And it will also create a learning pattern that needs to be unlearned for full recovery. So it's a pretty good program as well. This is the last part, the very end, but as I was working through this presentation, I was discussing, okay, I want to connect this to the Muslim community. How do I do this? And then I remembered, I'd read the autobiography of Malcolm X and Malcolm X is a fascinating person. He was a great mountain in our community. I love that term mountain. I actually heard one of the scholars use that term for people. And when you meet a person who's a mountain, it's just, it's unlike anything that you experience and you can't help but to be affected by that. So I encourage everybody to surround themselves with mountains in their lives because you might become a mountain too. Malcolm X was actually had severe addiction. He had addiction to narcotics. And he recovered through the programs of the nation of Islam. And he became the very productive and successful person we know now. He went through an evolution. So initially he was traumatized by his experiences as a black man in America. And this was at the height of the civil rights movement. So before, you know, that we met him or heard of him, but before that it was quite a difficult time and quite a lot of oppression that the black community had experienced. And he mentioned in his autobiography the six steps, but he did say that there was a parallel between us and the alcoholic synonymous. Their approach was so successful that the medical community actually interviewed them and asked them questions. And I was able to find an article from that time period where they had talked to him and interviewed him. And so I pulled some excerpts from that where the article said the use of group therapy through which the afflicted draws strength from the group and the transference of a new motivation to the patient to fill the void left by addiction is employed by this. So another group therapy approach and that's what the 12 steps is around. It's not just exclusives to 12 steps. The prevailing hypothesis was that the best way to, and I'm showing you this also because I want you, I'm also open to thoughts about this too, but I find this fascinating that because they did it a little, there's a little, because there is a cultural element to this, it was a little different. The prevailing hypothesis was that the best way to deal with a Negro addict would be to create a new identity for him. An identity that would give him a conscious understanding and pride in his negritude. Please forgive me for using these words. This meant the black Muslims, this meant the black Muslims said, creating a black psyche consisting of pride and race, black accomplishments and identification with the past of the Negro people in Africa. You can go to the next slide. So the first step was the addict was first brought, and I'm using the addict because this is literally from Malcolm X's excerpt, we don't like to use the word addict anymore, was brought to admit to himself that he was an addict. Second, he was taught why he used narcotics. Third, he was shown that the narcotics were more of a problem in the black community at this time, so that's why they mentioned narcotics. Third, he was shown that there was a way to stop addiction. Fourth, the addict's shattered self-image and ego were built up until the addict realized that he had within himself the self-power to end his addiction. Fifth, the addict voluntarily underwent a cold turkey break with drugs. Sixth, finally cured, now an ex-addict completes the cycle by phishing up other addicts whom he knows and supervising their salvaging. This is all just the crux of really what the 12-step program does, and that's the way, the reason I pulled this is because this is an amazing adaptation of the Muslim community to this phenomenon. The addict, and then Malcolm X said this in his book, which I just loved, the addict is brought into the local Muslim restaurant where he may occasionally be exposed to some other social situations among proud, clean Muslims who show each other mutual affection and respect instead of the familiar hostility of the ghetto streets. So the exposure to healthy, recovered Muslims was what maintained these people. And actually, I didn't know this, that most of the nation of Islam at that time was made up of recovered people in recovery. And it was such a powerful movement at that time. I mean, we all know about that time period and it produced the likes of Malcolm X that we can see the effect that it had on the community. So let's go to the next slide. So the question I want to end with after presenting all of this is, can we hold 12-step meetings at a mosque? Ask the board. This is something to think about because I think one thought is, well, why don't we just make it Muslim only? Have Muslims only attend these meetings, use Muslim literature? And there's nothing wrong with that, but I think we're missing out on the bigger community, the greater community who has experienced recovery, who's been doing this for a long time. I think there are things we can learn from them. I've just seen so, too many amazing cases that I would, and I've been affected by them personally, that I feel like I truly and sincerely feel like there are people in our community, quite a few people in our community, especially people who are in my generation, I'm a first-generation Muslim, who are just craving this, who are deeply wanting something like this, like what I've seen and experienced, and it takes, there's some wisdom, it takes some wisdom, you know? It's not easy to be around people who don't look like you and who are not exactly like you, but I think we need to, at some point, and now is the time to stop isolating ourselves and stop hiding and join the greater community and show them who we are, and it's okay if we're not perfect. In fact, I think if they see that we're not perfect and we're able to show, and we're able to see how similar we all are, we could not only solve the problem of addiction, but we could solve a lot of our problems, because I think a lot of our problems are the result of us hiding the whole time. They're waiting for us. They want us to come out and meet them. They want to see us. So the question and the answer ends with us. So now we have, oh, well, I think we are gonna have questions at the end if you can write it down. Try to remember, I can't remember questions for that long. Okay, good. So we're gonna circle back now to some of the research that the lab has been doing. And actually, inshallah, if I do a wonderful job at this part, it's gonna complement what Dr. Ariana just so beautifully and eloquently shared with all of us. But before I start, I wanna say that I am just one piece of the puzzle for the incredible research that I'll present with you all today. Dr. Rania, who is here with us today. Taimur, who is our actual, actually our team leader for the entire addiction team. So he oversees all of the projects. And then we have Zaynab, who's also one of the co-authors on our paper. And I present on behalf of all of them today. And they're incredible work as well. So what we wanna start with is, why did we do this paper? And earlier I had talked about how, during COVID, we did see an increase in usage. And we did see an increase in people who are struggling with various types of substance use. And we started to, as you start to ask like, well, why is this happening? Or you're trying to understand the state of literature. Well, the way to do that is to actually do the research. And so that's what we did. We decided we were gonna do this paper and we were gonna figure out what was happening with the Muslim community. What was being done? What are the perceptions that the community has? We used over 30 search terms to actually gather 124 articles that spanned over four decades. And I just wanna mention that the paper discusses various different substances. So we look at alcohol, we look at methadone, we look at tobacco cannabis, but we also looked at contributing factors. We looked at prevention and we looked at treatment as well. And I think one of the most important takeaways from today is gonna be that, less than a handful of all the papers, of the 124 were actually papers on studies done in North America. And so why, well, why is that important? It's important because as we tried to understand the state of Muslims globally and also here locally, well, we couldn't quite do just that because there was no literature. And so for us to really understand what's going on with Muslims in North America and how we can support and understand their unique struggles, we have to do more literature and more research that, inshallah, the lab will take on in the future. So as we were going through me and Taymur, we were talking and he said this beautiful thing as I was preparing for the presentation today that I really did wanna share with you guys and that addiction and substance use, it is a silent problem. And just because there's no data or a lack of research that we are able to find, it doesn't mean that that issue does not exist. We just need better data. That's what we need. So we need more research. We need more people who are willing to take on this work and support us in understanding where our community's at. Just like Dr. Arianna said, you meet them where they're at. We're not gonna stand over on one end and say, yeah, you're gonna walk towards us now. We gotta take the literature to them. We have to come to them and meet them exactly where they're at. So after we reviewed the 124 articles, we started to realize what are the main takeaways that we wanted for both ourselves, our team, we presented to our own lab, and also for the community. What are we finding that is really important for community members to walk away with? And the reality is there's a lack of literature. Even the 124 articles over a span of four decades is not a lot of research to really support us in understanding the state of addiction or substance use among Muslim populations. And even when we did find a paper, it didn't necessarily mean that that paper was specifically studied on Muslim populations. It just meant Muslims happened to be part of the population studied. So you might find like 17% Muslim. But again, that paper wasn't explicitly done on Muslims. And then when we look at the literature in North America, it's almost non-existent. Like I said, less than a handful. Although in 2021, there were a few additional publications, which we were really excited about as a lab because it was spot on what we were trying to look at and really understand. And again, I talked earlier about one of the papers that we're gonna do, and it was an Islamic, an understanding addiction from the Islamic perspective. And something that came up in the literature frequently was as researchers, there was a lack of clarity around the Islamic ethics of substance abuse. So as we read various papers, it was mentioned that, and more clarity is required to fully understand the state of addiction within the Muslim context or the Islamic context. So that's really important to note for us as researchers. So what do I wanna focus on today? And it kind of really takes off from where Dr. Ariana ended. Like, can we do the set of masjid? And I really wanna talk about throughout all of these papers that we read, the ones that focused on treatment and community, I wanna talk about the role of religious spaces and the community, cause everybody here is a community, everybody who's watching us live is, you're part of that community. And we can no longer ignore the role that we play in recovery and education towards one another. So I've broken it down into a few points here. So I'll start with one. Addiction and mental health more generally is stigmatized with stigma being the foremost barrier in the Muslim community. Despite people saying that they feel more comfortable in religious spaces or with their own community. So even though I'm comfortable, I'm not willing to get the help because of the stigma. Even though I'm more comfortable, I'm not willing to even like take that first step because of the stigma. And this is a stigma, it comes up in the literature, like as mentioned on the slide, not just in addiction and mental health just more broadly. So addiction is kind of like a stigma within a stigma, if you will. And one of the studies that we actually looked at was a study done in Canada and they had 90 minute, they did seven 90 minute psychoeducational webinars across mosques in Toronto, Canada. And at the end of every seminar, they did a post survey and what they found was that 63.3% of participants at the end of it were more motivated to go out and support their friends and family. 60, like that's more than half of the people there who you get 90 minutes of exposure to such a great topic. The topics incorporated both addiction and Islamic ethics and the understanding and support and treatment from the Islamic perspective and drawing from our tradition. And beyond that 48.4% said that the integration of that Islamic context was what was the motivating factor. That's why they wanted to go out and do something for their community. And they walked out with positively changed perceptions on the topic of addiction. So then, you know, 90 minutes, you've kind of taken care of some of the stigma, people are more motivated to support, they've got an understanding of the Islamic perspective and the fundamentals of Islam when we talk about addiction and the way that they viewed individuals who were struggling with addiction change, the way we viewed addiction as a social issue changed. Another study that we looked at, which I think really speaks to the gravity of stigma was a study done in Malaysia where they had gone through all of the logistics, they got approval to start, you know, a treatment. It was a treatment for methadone at a masjid and then right as they were about to start the masjid committee changed. So there's a new leadership within the masjid and the new committee came in and said, we're not gonna take this on, this is gonna give us a bad reputation. We don't want the mosque associated with any of these services. And so you had these participants who were ready to come and they were actually excited and like looking forward to the fact that this was a service provided at the masjid. They were looking forward to it and all of a sudden it was like, no, we're not gonna do this. And so, you know, the researchers in the article, they talk about how they're kind of like, okay, well now we need to find a new masjid because we wanna do this at the masjid because that was part of the reason people wanted to go. And so it ends on a good note in that there was another masjid that was able to take on and sponsor the event. And so what I really take from that is the gravity of stigma. When we look at people who are community leaders, when we look at our religious spaces and for us, you know, our masjid really, well, if there's stigma within the masjid, how many people does that impact? If there's stigma within our higher up community leaders, how many people are impacted? Just like this study. It wasn't only participants who are impacted. As Dr. Arianna said, if you're one person in a family in a cohort of any kind, all of those people are affected. So you're trying to get that care and you're going for it, masha'Allah, you know? But no, like, you know, that stigma is a barrier. So the first thing that we talked about, that stigma is a barrier. And then, you know, one of the last things that really, masha'Allah, you know, you say and you read this research by the end of like five hours of you reading addiction research, you're really overwhelmed and like your brain has taken you all sorts of places, masha'Allah, but one of the things that stuck with me through all of this was, in another study that we looked at in Iran, a brother, they were talking to him and they were discussing with him why he was resistant to go to rehab. You know, there was a rehab facility, it was gonna be free of charge, he didn't have to pay anything, but he said, I won't go. And so the researchers were trying to pry like, well, why don't you wanna go? What's going on here? And what he said was, I'll tell you, right now my problem is silent. Nobody knows I'm struggling with it. The minute I check into rehab, I'm gonna be away from my family and his entire community, so people are gonna know, well, something's up and he didn't want that. And then he said, if I go and I come back, now people know I've come back from rehab, no one's gonna marry their daughter to me. I won't find a spouse in my community. My community will not accept me and I'm not gonna get a job. So for him, you know, the stigma of the community, now we talked about the masjid, now we're talking about stigma within our community, it's pan-Allah, you know, he didn't feel like he could overcome that because of when he came back, the way people were gonna talk about him or the way people were gonna view him, it's gonna impact the rest of his life and that wasn't worth it for him. And so, you know, the major takeaway here is how do we ourselves, you know, as community members here today, what's our perception of this topic and what are we doing anything to kind of like change that perception and you know, inshallah, here, if you're here today, then you are, so alhamdulillah for that, but you know, just also thinking of the gravity of the situation when somebody's willing to put really their care on the side, just to not have to deal with that backlash. And here's a quote from one of the papers that I had talked about, this was on the study that was done in Canada and one of the community members at the end of it wrote this down and he said, I'm further encouraged to check my biases and offer more compassion to individuals with addiction. Despite the stigma in our community, it is important to consider what the Quran says about addictions and inshallah, you know, we have Sheik Rami who's with us today and he'll talk more about, more like, you know, from the religious perspective, but this is really important for us to know that we are the community. So if we went, you know, sometimes you're talking and you're like, yeah, the community, there's no the community, we are the community, you know, so we are just as much a part of that. I'll segue into, you know, section two where I really wanna talk about how the masjids were recognized in our literature as these communal spaces for Muslims. The community congregates around prayer, education, awareness and more. So we can't just think of the masjid as a place to, oh, I just came and I pray and I left. You know, what we're doing right now, this is not prayer, we're here in an educational manner and that's very much a part of this communal space. And so it's kinda obvious that this would be a central space for engaging community hardships like addiction and many other mental health challenges. For people who are community oriented and people who are God centered, the masjid is the place that they wanna be as they navigate some of these challenges and educational, you know, webinars just like we're doing today. And then I'll go back to, and I'll segue back to that Malaysian study where, you know, the mosque basically said, no, we're not doing that here. When one of the things that the paper talked about was how, and this is what they were trying to push back with is that, but, you know, masjid were not just a place of prayer even in our history. They were a place of communal gatherings. They were a place of education. And so they were simply trying to use it again as one of, you know, as a place for treatment for individual struggling with, again, it was methadone. But really we have to realize that that wasn't, that wasn't the only use of the masjid. And that's what the researchers were trying to show. And so panel, again, it didn't work with the first mosque but they did great for the second mosque. One of the other studies that we looked at, which was beautiful and this segues really from what Dr. Ayanna talked about. This is a study that was done in Palestine and what we found was in this mosque, it was done at a mosque, it was, they broke down treatment into a five step approach. And they did not, when people kind of admitted themselves and said, I want this or I need this support, they didn't, you know, they weren't brought in and then, you know, met with, okay, read Quran and pray and do all this like incredible like spirituality stuff, which is so important. But the first thing that they actually did was detox and they'd used medication to help them, you know, lower cravings, just as Dr. Ayanna spoke about. And then they shifted into all the other, you know, spirituality and group counseling. And you can't, it was really treated as a disease and that's what I really want to end with are, you know, for this specific study was that people weren't met with like Dean and religion right off the bat. They were all Muslim, they were coming in, seeking the support at a masjid. So there's already that kind of openness to the space. And we saw that in multiple other studies where, you know, people talked about how being at a masjid, they felt more open to talk about these topics. They trusted the information more that they received at the mosque than information they would receive at a hospital. And Dr. Ayanna touched how like, you know, treatment, one of the places that you get treatment is a hospital. Well, why can't it be a masjid? If we know people, trust it more. If we know people are more open. And you know, religious leaders, they're a part of that community leaders, religious leaders, they're a part of that communal space. And if they endorse these services at their local masjid, then we can hope that us as a community and community members who might be on the fence would also endorse that and start accepting and maybe even coming to them just to kind of learn what's going on and support fellow community members who are struggling. And so I have another quote for you guys from one of the papers that we talked about. And this one is that, this one talks about more how the mosque was used in lieu of a treatment center. And again, this was just psychoeducation, so people weren't getting any treatment per se. And this is not necessarily somebody who was struggling with addiction. The article does not mention that. But he says that the seminar is in a spiritual place and it affects my openness to discuss the topic of addictions because I'm with people who share the same religion as me. I feel comfortable since it's a masjid setting. And that openness and that comfort, that's almost like step one. As soon as that is situated, you start talking, you start healing with your community, with your mosque, really with everybody who's, Mashallah decided to show up as well. So what's the takeaway? The takeaway is one, stigma negatively impacts our community. And to tackle it, when you don't all hands on deck approach, that means don't just look towards your religious leaders or your community members or your teachers or your parents, you are a part of that community. And you have a role that you play in tackling stigma. So it could be through education. We looked at that in the research and I talked about that, how when we educate people around us or how when we educate ourselves, that stigma could reduce. We check our biases, where am I at? Is that how I feel? Okay, maybe I need to go out and seek some extra knowledge. Nothing wrong with that. Two, masjids are communal spaces for Ibada and helping our struggling community members is a part of Ibada, like what we're doing today. This is, we can consider this a part of our Ibada for the day. We're out here, we're trying to learn, we're trying to stay up to date with the best terminology. How do I address the topic of addiction? Did I check my biases at the end of this? At the end of this talk as well. And three is, our research and the Dean's support, the utilization of masjid as ideal places for addressing and treating addiction in our Muslim community. This is, again, I started off with, it can no longer be ignored and I don't mean to say that we've been ignoring it and looking the other way, but Dr. Ayanna in Florida, somebody's coming up and saying like, hey, can we do this at the masjid? We wanna be able to answer, yes, where do we start? And not, oh, look back to you on that one. Oh, okay, masha'Allah. So hopefully we'll look for different responses in the future, but what we really wanna do is, again, meet your community members where they're at. If it's somebody in your family, meet them where they're at. You don't want to start tugging them towards you and then subhanAllah, like everything that Dr. Ayanna talked about and everything that I've discussed so far really do speak to the severity of meeting them where they're at. Don't, you don't wanna isolate, you don't wanna push them aside, bring them into your community and kind of navigate it from there, insha'Allah. So on my end, alhamdulillah, that kind of concludes the paper that we've been working on at the lab and I will pass on to Sheikh Rami who could talk a little more about it within the Islamic context and some of his work personally. Bismillah. Asalaamu alaikum everyone. I wanna begin by thanking MCC for hosting this event and also for Dr. Ayanna, for Muna, Dr. Rania, everybody to join in on this and also for us to take a moment to realize what's emerging right now, what's coming into existence in the MCC space because this is very new for the Masajid space and when Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala wants something to happen, he brings SBAP, he brings causes together. So we've had a number of people over the years come to MCC and we've started a series of these panels and a few months ago when I saw the first flyer of Dr. Ayanna doing a lecture on addiction, I was excited. I said, alhamdulillah, now we have another person because we had other people who were working on this. Dr. Ahmed was an addiction specialist from Stanford and he's done a few panels. So MCC is really now a pioneer. If we as a community and the board of trustees allow this to emerge and not nip it in the bud because there's a lot of things that are coming together that could really like a lot could happen out of this and MCC can be a pioneer in this discussion and establishing a model for how does the Masajid act as that, how does the Masjid act as that space? How do we bring together the like-minded people for to address this issue of addiction in our community? I wanna begin by just mentioning a few things that we have to remember in our Dean as Muslims, as the way we walk in life and the way we look at things, we cannot address complex issues with simple solutions. I wanna say that again. We cannot address complex issues with simple solutions and I'll give you an example. Years ago when I was studying, not years ago, now it's been decades ago, when I was studying in West Africa in Mauritania, a friend of mine from the UK, he mentioned an improper application of the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and it's a hadith that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, a man came to him and complained about poverty. He was poor, he was looking for a handout. So what did the Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam do? He could have easily pointed somebody to give him money but he asked and he said, do you have anything at home? Cause he was basically saying, I have nothing. Says, no, do you have something? He said, I have a clay pot. He said, bring the clay pot. He brought the clay pot. He auctioned it at the masjid. Who will give me something for this? One dirham, no, two dirham. He's teaching him, you do have some resources. He auctioned it off and he said, who has an axe head? Somebody said, I have it. He said, I purchased it now with this two dirham. So he's showing him now, you can take your resources and now transfer it into an axe head. Now get me a piece of wood. The Prophet Muhammad himself affixed the axe head to the piece of wood, gave it to the man, said now go into the mountains and chop wood. Now that's a very, very profound deep hadith. We can use it as a model of how to create self-sufficiency in people, work ethic, recognizing the resources that you have. Unfortunately, when people see that, and this is where the UK story comes in, the friend, my friend from the UK said that sometimes when people come to the masjid and ask for financial assistance, they'll say, go chop some firewood. Now is that what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did? He didn't. He didn't oversimplify this complex issue. He walked the person through a few steps. Later on when the man came back and he said, how are you doing it? He said, oh, I'm financially stable. Like he was doing very, very, very well. So in the same way, when we look at addiction, we cannot draw certain things from our tradition and then address it in that simple way, like the people who said, oh just go chop some firewood. So if somebody comes to you, a friend, a family member, a community member says, I'm dealing with addiction, we cannot oversimplify the response and say, oh, it's haram, just stop it. Or if you were really practicing your Islam, it would be able to stop it. Just make toba. Just have a spiritual experience. Tasawwuf is enough or ihsan is enough, spiritual. Just focus on that. That's an oversimplification of how our Dean actually is. And for many of us, we may have this book at home called tib bin nabawee, just a show of hands. Who has the prophetic medicine as a book at home? Prophetic medicine, tib nabawee. How much of that book is actually literal lessons from the Prophet Muhammad SAW? Very little. It's a few hadith. The rest of it is what the Muslims gathered when they were exposed to Greek medicine, when they were exposed to Indian medicine in India, when they were exposed to the medicine of the Persians. And they said, you know what? I think this is congruent with our faith. Let's take this in. Umar, radiallahu anhu actually sent two people when he was the Khalifa to the Byzantines, he said, learn everything about medicine from the Byzantines, the Romans, the Rumi. When they came back, he said, now place everything you've learned on the scales of the Quran and the Sunnah. We keep what is congruent and we leave what is not. So he wasn't saying, oh, the Quran and Sunnah is enough for us for medicine. He was saying, no, look at what's available. What are other humans in their human experience have collected and then we'll put it on our scales. So this is what we're doing. That's what Tlibbin Nebbi was doing. It was saying, we have some indications that the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam would say, use honey in this situation. You know, when you balance your foods, if you're going to eat date, which is dry and hot, eat cucumbers with it, which is cold and wet, you know, have this balancing of the diet. So then the Muslims just went and they like ran with it. So to speak. So this is what, when we see examples in the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam's life of him addressing addiction, we have to say, these are indications. He's showing us, go in this direction, have this response, but then fill it in. Take it and run with it. There was a young man who came to the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam in the Masjid context and he complained. He said, the thing that was most beloved to him was Zina, illegal intercourse. He loved it. He said, I love it more than anything in the world. When he said that, now he's coming to the Prophet not to boast about it, but to say, I have an issue, can you help me with it? The Sahaba that were around him, the companions that were around him, they said, meh, meh, like, quiet, quiet, don't talk about this. So what are they doing? That was basically the board of the committee where he's like, no, no, no, no, no, not in the Masjid space, not around the Prophet. No, no, no, come on, this is not the place for it. Keep it, keep it, keep it silent, stigmatize it, silence it, keep it in the shadows, we don't need to know about it. What did the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam do? He walked him through a process. He said, would you like this for your mother? No. He said, and people are like that. In other words, that person is somebody's mother that you're interacting in that way with. Would you like this for your sister? No, of course not. And people are like that as well. They don't want this for their sisters. And he went through all of his female relatives, you know, step by step, I could say this is almost a type of talk therapy or CBT or that he was walking him through, indicating like, he didn't just say, it's haram, don't do it, stop it cold turkey, which you know, there are people who can stop cold turkey, but he didn't tell him that he walked him through a process. Then he made dua for him, the spiritual side. Sometimes people might say, oh, just make dua and it'll stop. That's not the way the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam treated this man's sex addiction. He said, he walked him through a cognitive process thinking about it. And then he made dua. So he had both the cognitive side and the spiritual side, which we need that in our approach to recovery. So now if we look at that hadith and other hadith or say the famous Sahaba Abdullah and Noaiman, who was addicted to alcohol, he was addicted to alcohol and he was a Sahabi and he was punished for it because there is an Islamic punishment for alcohol use. But after he was punished, some of the Sahaba started calling him names and the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam stopped him. He said, he loves Allah and his messenger. He loves Allah and his messenger. You don't know who this person is. And Dr. Arianna mentioned a few times about the spirituality of addiction and the spirituality, the level of people who have addiction and the mountains that they are and that they could even be bigger mountains and we can't make a person just the sum of their actions, which is why the move is away from referring to addict because you're not an addict. You are a human being with thoughts and love and fears and hopes and emotions and struggles. One of them happens to be addiction. So you are not an addict. So how did the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam respond to him and how did he, how was he incorporated in the community? So I knew these stories, but you know, for me, and now I'll just a little bit of how my path to learning about addiction, because as Dr. Arianna mentioned that we have to have compassion. We have to approach this with compassion and with understanding and part of that understanding come or as part of that compassion comes through understanding. I've had friends and family who have struggled with addiction, both narcotics as well as alcohol. On my mother's side of the family, I've had an uncle who passed away due to complications of alcoholism. So when Dr. Arianna was mentioning about the end result being death and this was the uncle who was closest to me on my mother's side. My father's from Jordan, my mother's from Mississippi and we spent a lot of time with him. And so to watch him go through this process of alcoholism and not get treatment and eventually pass away of complications related to that it was very, very overwhelming for me. And Subhanallah, I mean, I got the news that he had passed away right as I was going into a final for a course of one of my master's programs and I should not have read the test at that time but I had to, I just, I read it and then I just had to push through it and then process the grief afterwards. But it is, it's very, I'm still grieving. And so I know the effect of what it could do to a human being. There might be, this might be relevant or not but there's a song called Tennessee Whiskey. And there's a lyric in there. It's about a man who fell in love, the love of a woman helped him get over his alcohol addiction and he says, but you rescued me from drowning in the bottle. And it goes on, it's a very famous song, it resonates with a lot of people and I think it's because of the deep meaning that it captures. And when every time I hear it, I tear up because I think of my uncle who did drown in the bottle because he did not find the love, whatever that would have been in spirituality and a path and treatment in a woman and family and friends that rescued him from drowning in the bottle. More recently, I had a student of mine through Thlava Foundation where we worked with the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated and to give you an idea of incarceration in America, the majority of people who are incarcerated are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses, nonviolent drug offenses. And they're being treated for their addiction by prison which is the criminalization of addiction or the criminalization of also as well of mental illness because they're overrepresented in the prison population. And so about 20 years ago or so, I started teaching Muslims who were in prison and then we founded an organization, Thlava Foundation, to teach Muslims in prison about our faith through a correspondence and a distance education program. And over time, we just focused just on the Islamic element. And this was a tipping point or a turning point for me. Brother Justin, Abdul Saddam, and he's given me full permission to share his story. I said it could benefit other people. He was a person who, as Dr. Arianna was saying, some of these people are deeply spiritual. He's one of the most deeply spiritual people I know. And he's getting up for Tajib every single night and he's memorizing classical texts in Arabic. He's teaching, he's leading the prayer in the prison chapel. He's for all intents and purposes, he is an Imam. He knows the Dean, he practices the Dean, he teaches the Dean, he converted to Islam in prison, taught him, and then we enhance that. Now he's translating texts from Arabic into English. When he went home, because he spent 10 years of his incarceration working on his Islam, just the Islamic, the element of his Islam was his knowledge of the theology and practice and Tasawaf as well, Tezkiyah, purification of the heart. But he didn't address his addiction. So when he went home, he got paroled to a place where there was drug paraphernalia all over the place. We actually tried to have him paroled to California but because the way the parole system is, you have to go back to the county where you committed your crime, which goes against logic. So anyway, he goes back to the only place that he had there, there was drug paraphernalia all over the place, a renter had five dogs living in the house, you can just imagine the chaos. And as Dr. Arianna was mentioning, once a person goes back from a situation, in prison it wasn't a rehab center but he did not have the access to the, there is narcotics and alcohol in prison but he didn't have as easy access so he was able to stay away from it. Plus there's a tight knit Muslim community that will check you at every point. So he had that support system. He goes home, he doesn't have that. He starts his downward spiral. His, the coping mechanism that he falls back on is his addiction. And later I asked him, I said, why didn't you reach out to us at the time? He said, because I was afraid of letting you down. And I said, never have that feeling. We're here for you at any point in your life. Needless to say, he kept spiraling down. He mixed two drugs. It was a bad mixture, caused a psychotic break. And at that point he actually wanted to take his own life. So he doused himself with gasoline, with lighter fluid but could not get himself to light the match. So he concocted an idea to commit a crime and they call this suicide by cop where the cops would then shoot him and the spark from the bullet would set the lighter fluid on fire and that's how he would die. So he went, he did commit a crime in the process of the crime and remind you he's in a psychotic break now due to the drugs that comes out of his addiction that was untreated by the prison and then put him back into society with no support system. So he goes, he commits the crime. Eventually when they catch him, they stack everything up and then he's now facing 37 years in prison. Which is stemming from his addiction. So what it caused for us, for me as an individual and as an organization at Tlaib is saying, okay, we're offering the Islamic education but now we also have to recognize this other element of their life as part of their Islamic education. So when he reached back out to us and said, could you send me the books? Because I've lost all my Islamic education books. I said, no problem, Abdus Salam, we're gonna send you the books. But at the same time, just as you feel that studying that Islamic knowledge is part of your individual obligation, your Fard al-Ain, I want you to go on a deep inward journey to find out what happened and why, introspection. And so with my encouragement, he did, he went on that. He started looking into a lot of unaddressed issues. Unfortunately the prison doesn't give him enough resources so he stayed on a waiting list for six months to see a professional. Once he got to see a professional, it was somebody with an undergraduate degree in psychology, not even clinical training or addictions specialty. So then I started asking other therapists for their advice and there's issues with offering therapy to a currently incarcerated individual across state boundaries, the person in prison, all of this. So I said, okay, let's do some maybe psychoeducation. So I reached out to a Muslim mental health professional who has a lot of experience and addiction and she said, ask him about childhood trauma and abuse. And it was a conversation I never had. And as soon as I asked that question, the floodgates opened. And so then I said, have you ever addressed that? He said, never. Nobody's ever asked me. All the addiction treatments that you have done in prison, has anybody ever touched on that? No. So one of the books that was recommended to me, actually by my mother was Gabor Mate's book in the realm of the hungry ghosts. And I sent that to him and he said, that was the best book on addiction that he's ever had. And Gabor Mate, if you're not familiar with him, he's got a lot of things online. He runs, I believe it's a methadone clinic in Vancouver. And in that book, in the realm of hungry ghosts, there's also some Muslims who share their stories. So then I also, at that time, I met Dr. Ahmed and I started asking him to correspond with Justin and that helped me learn more about addiction and understanding it and having more of that compassion. And then he suggested Kraft. He's the Kraft program, the smart recovery program. I actually got certified in it to facilitate a group for friends and family. So that helped me learn more about addiction since I had not gone through that experience myself but I could understand what, I could understand more of what another person is and also to help out families who have gone through that. And then I could speak a lot more but this is the book getting your loved one sober without nagging, it's called Gilos. It's part of the Kraft recovery. And if you have a friend or family, this is a good book to read. Another book that I read to understand the 12 Steps was Russell Brand's book which is called Recovery. Cover is off of it. But he was, Russell Brand is a comedian from the UK deeply addicted to heroin which is one of the most difficult drugs to get over and he was also extremely addicted. He had an extreme sex addiction as well. And he said the 12 Steps actually got him out of those two addictions. And now if you see his podcast and you see what he's talking about, you can see going back to again what Dr. Arianna was saying, that deep spirituality that's actually there that was hidden. And I'm just gonna run through some of this because this is just kind of like my history of understanding it. We were talking in a group, an MSA group and it actually a person stood up and he he shared in front of almost 200 people some of the struggles that he's going with and then responding to him in a way that I've learned through some of these programs also motivational interviewing and which is part of that bringing out that internal motivation and intrinsic desire to change using some of that, it started this whole conversation where it was very, you could hear a pin drop in the room. And I talk about it in some of the writing, I'm kind of going very quickly. But Ostad, Obedullah Evans opened up about his father being a heroin addict and how he had distanced himself from his father. And then he mentioned that one time to Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Sheikh Hamza said, well, you know, I think your father might have in another realm might have been a saint. And he said, what are you doing? He never thought about that. He said, well, because those people who are seeking, they're not satisfied with this dunya that's right in front of them. They want something ethereal, something beyond this dunya, but they're going about it the wrong way through substance. And so he mentioned this book, blessed are the addicts, the spiritual side of alcoholism, addiction and recovery, which I bought right there in the hallway on Amazon. No, and then, and I'm just rushing through this because of time, another brother who facilitates an intensive therapeutic community within one of the prisons where we work with Ahmad Adisa and has been facilitating 12 steps groups for many, many years. I started talking to him about it and because of his also deep study and practice of Tasawwuf, Tezquia, Iqsan, you know, whatever name we're gonna call it, Iqsan by any other name is still Iqsan. I said, could you do, you know, and he was talking about a lot of the 12 steps from the spiritual aspect. I said, could you do a 12 steps, explanation of the 12 steps with your understanding of our tradition of spirituality as Muslims? And so he went on the road to do that. As he was looking for some references in the chapel library in the prison, he came across this one, recovery, the 12 steps as a spiritual practice, wrote by Rami Shapiro, it's a Jewish name as well. I'm not Jewish, although sometimes when I wear a kufi and people will tell me shalom, I guess it's anyway, I'm not gonna go off into that, but anyway, so these are just some of my experience. It culminated in about three years of Abdus Salam, just in the one I told you his story and Ahmed Adisa who runs a 12 steps for intensive therapeutic community, he's one of the facilitators in the prison, of they both wrote this book together and we published it through Taba, Overcoming Addiction and Islamic Approach to Recovery. And I encourage you all to read it. Whether or not you're dealing with addiction or if you have family or as Dr. Arianna was mentioning in there, you know, the first step is, you know, overcome, it could have been addiction, it could have been a substance, it could have been a personality, it could have been a behavior, it could have been a person, you know, it has a lot of crossover and that's what Russell Brand as well talks about, that the 12 steps has applications for everybody and understanding it, you know, to that. So I brought some of these books, they're available and I can talk more about that, but it's been a deeply transformative journey for me to understand more about addiction, I now approach it more with compassion and when you have that, when you have that as a spirit inside of you that you approach it as compassion, people will notice it right away, right away. It's just like kids, you know, if a kid walks up, like a kid just walked up to the door and if you greet him with a smile, all of a sudden the kid now wants to interact with you. In the same way, adults, any human being is very attuned at a very deep level to that acceptance. And so if you just, you don't even have to be an expert. If you just say, I'm here with you and I'm not, you know, stigmatized or judged or shun or anything, people will open up to you and I've had people text me, students of mine, sheikh, I can't go on like this forever. And then I have to go through us and what are you talking about? You know, go through the suicide response that we should all be trained in to say, what are you talking about? But he was talking about his alcohol addiction, 3 a.m. at Texan. And so we should have those relationships where people can open up and in our masjid. And that's why I'm so excited about, you know, this opportunity to look, to go forward and say, can we use this as the masjid as a space? In the Bay Area, we have about 80 masjid and musallas. There's not one that holds an AA meeting. There is actually one. There's one. Does anybody know which masjid it is? What's that? Do they do that now? I don't know, they may. That might be recent. But before Lighthouse, does anybody know? It's the San Francisco Muslim Community Center, led by Imam Abu Qadir, who is part of the community of Imam Muwardin Muhammad, Rahimullah. And they come out of the nation of Islam. And so they realize the importance of having this, you know, this treatment. And this is not something just in the inner cities. Wallah al-Azim. When I was doing religious counseling here on the weekends for, and Muneer knows this, because they're coming to his office too. People are coming to the masjid all the time, saying, I have this issue with myself, with my child, you know, it's here. It's here in our masjid. We just now have to just to recognize and say, okay, you know, oh, you're here for the Quran class, it's over there. You're here for addiction treatment, it's right over there. You're here for tarawih, it's right over there. Like, what's the difference? You're here for the food pantry, it's right over there. You have financial struggles, it's right over there. Oh, you have Zakat application. What's the difference? You know, it should be just like, welcome, you're here to get sober, 12 steps meeting in the back. That's what we, I had one young man who was a teenager, his mother brought him in. He told me that his introduction to marijuana was at the masjid. Another Muslim at the masjid introduced him out of vape with the marijuana cards that don't smell. You can't even smell them anymore. And I counseled him right here in that office over there. And then in this hallways during the boys groups that we used to have on Friday nights, one of the fathers came up to me in front of everybody. I mean, in fact, I was like, are you, you're, you're disclosing this about your addiction in the hallway? Somebody could over here, but he was just, he just wanted somebody to talk to and knew that we were doing this friends and family recovery group in the masjid here. And so he opened up about his addiction and was crying in the hallways right over here. So it's here in the masjid. The Muslims who will go to Doherty Valley, so many high schoolers at Doherty Valley are using substances to cope with the stress of their parents wanting them to get 4.2 and 4.3 GPAs. Still don't understand how that happens, but there's so much stress and so that's what they're coping mechanism that they're going to. So it's here in our masjid, it's here. People are coming to tell me, he said one young man said, I come to the masjid high sometimes. And his parents don't even know about it. So we have to do something. What does that look like? I don't know. But I hope and I pray and I'll look at the camera to the board of directors and to the board of trustees, I hope and I pray and this is my solemn request that this is not nipped in the bud and that you don't take the position of the Sahaba who we understandable will say, man, man, like literally it means shut up. We don't want that. We want you to take the prophetic approach of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu alaihi wa sallam which is to have that welcoming and the addressment and the treatment. How that looks, Allahu A'lam. But its place is in the masjid and to the supporters of the Masjid community all over the US and the world. If you're giving your donations to a masjid, that board of directors and that board of trustees is beholden to you as a congregation and as a community. And if you are not seeing this being treated in the masjid, whether it's an auxiliary space connected close to the masjid or facilitated within the masjid. But if it's not masjid led and owned and facilitated, then you have a right to ask that board of directors and that board of trustees, where is my money going? Allahu Akbar. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. As-Sallallahu alaihi wa sallam Sayyidina Muhammad wa-alaihi wa sallam al-ajma'in. As we close up, inshallah, the panel, I appreciate all of you here today, those who've been here patiently, masha'Allah, through this program and also those who are online and those who might watch this afterwards in the recording. My deep gratitude and thanks is I kind of do a summary and closing here and take some questions. Just a summary of what the panel's been to Dr. Arianna. Thank you so much for the explanation really of a very important understanding of what is substance abuse, understanding from the medical model, understanding of recovery and how exactly you go about that. She broke it down so beautifully step by step to really help us understand what is this illness? How do you treat it? How do you go about it? And then I love, thank you so much for tying in the discussion around that the Muslim community, Muslim communities have actually done this before. This is not new, not historically and not in current modern Muslim communities and bringing of course a very American reality of the masha'Allah, the work of Balqa Meqs and all of those who are part of the Nation of Islam, the Waduddin Muhammad movement and onwards and onwards masha'Allah that have continued this work. And so that kind of conversation ties in so lovely to what you're saying, Shehrami, and what you have said, and I thank you both for your conversation when we took it from the academic side, kind of looking at the research around this, what exactly has been done and the major gaps. I mean major gaps in understanding. I'll tell you this as somebody who, Alhamdulillah, is the researcher that's in charge of this lab in the first place that honestly as we look through the work, there's very little. And people say, what's happening with Muslims in America? Well, it's such a, speaking of taboo and stigma that this is almost like, we call these stigmas within stigmas, right? The larger stigma of mental health and within it the stigma here of substance abuse. And if you look at this, it's really hard to sort out and even be able to accurately tell you what exactly is happening with Muslims that are American with substance abuse. We don't have the knowledge, we don't have the data. We don't even have data points to tell you exactly. Very, very similar to some of the work that I'm sure you're familiar with that we did just recently on the topic of, also a difficult topic in the Muslim community, suicide. Stigma within a stigma, right? And when you start to actually put the research and get anchor and data points and be able to say, this is the reality, then you can go and I was trying so hard to compose myself, Shahram, as you mentioned about, speak directly to the camera and the board. But it's not just the board of this particular message but actually the boards of all massaged across the US. Anybody who's in a position of power and authority and leadership to say stop sticking your head in the sand. It doesn't work that way. These are issues that are part and parcel of our community just as they are with any other community of human beings. It's a human issue, right? And so therefore we find very solid solutions and thank you, Shahram, for sharing about the stories directly at the time of the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. I'll remind us just very quickly as we wrap up kind of in thinking about this that the Sahaba, Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala put the Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam as a living example and embodiment of Islam. Literally called the walking Quran. How exactly do you implement the rules of Islam? He gave us a human being, a person to show us how you do that. And then a community around him, which we call the Sahaba, right? The Sahaban's Habiat Male and Female, to actually commune together, to live together, to figure out what are all of the issues. And it is no exception that within all of the Sahaba and Sahabiya to find every single, every single minor and major sin and every single illness and every single struggle that humans go through has actually been documented in the Sahaba and Sahabiya. We do this strange thing sometimes as Muslims where we like put on these rose colored glasses and we romanticize the Sahaba and they were just these, and they were, they were mountains. No doubt, every single one of them, but they also had human conditions and struggles that they went through. And in those interactions with the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and with each other, we learned so much of what you do. The guide, the living guide of what Islam has meant to actually embody. We have beautiful guides, but we tend to not use them as much, right? So a lot of the work that we're doing actually is a revival. It's kind of going backward and reviving that historical understanding and putting it into modern practice. So with that, inshallah, I'll pause here in kind of the summary of what we've talked about in our panels, but that big question that you both asked remains, are we ready to have a 12-step type group in the Masjid? Let's call it substance recovery. Whatever it is, like you said, you said Ihsan by any other name is Ihsan? Exactly, it's an Ihsan-based group. Are we ready to have it in our Masjid? Are we ready to have the friends and family component? Because we tried. If you remember, right before the pandemic, this Masjid here, who was a pioneer in Mashal and doing so, attempted a first round at a friends and family group for those who are dealing with substance abuse. Then supanallah, the pandemic came in and sort of wasn't able to meet as regularly and turning it into a virtual setting didn't work quite as well. But here we are now. Are we ready? And so that's the question I'm going to leave us with and I'm going to kind of wrap up this panel and ask for your questions, inshallah, in the audience, if there are any, but also to see, inshallah, to really push forward the conversation because I hope between what Munna said, Dr. Arianna said, Shaikh Rami said, it's clear that not only is this important, that we have a historical precedence for it and that it can actually happen if we decide to take those courageous first steps. Barakallahu feekum muzzallahu mahala Sayyidina Muhammad, mahala aliyya sahbiyya sahbiyya. So we have just 20 minutes before our Zohar prayer. So if you can keep your questions concise and sing for the panelists, inshallah, and further, go ahead. All right, al-Salaik, thank you guys. That was really good. Just so really quickly, just, I know we want to start like substance abuse programs and a lot of the PowerPoints are about substance abuse but will there also be things about like behavioral addictions, like sex, food, et cetera? So before I, we set up this seminar, I, Manir came to me and explained the whole situation to me and asked me what we could do. And my, I think it's really great that we're blessed with, this community is so blessed. I'm coming from Florida. We don't have as many prominent speakers and knowledgeable people as you have here. And, but I think one thing that we are, I think we're overdoing, we've been overdoing for the past couple decades now. We have a lot of speaking going on. We have a lot of speeches, we have a lot of lectures. I think, I don't know, I get bored easily. So I think we, I mean, when is it gonna be enough that we're here and we have lectures all the time? You can go on YouTube and you can pull up tons of videos, lectures all over the place. Muslims are really great now at pressing the button and listening to lectures. But now we need to do something. We need to actually do the footwork. So my answer to Muneer was that we can do some seminars to start luring people back to try to let people know that we're wanting to do something again. And meetings are a good idea, but I suggested doing something different this time instead of having it rely on a couple of people to be there to host it and to head it. That instead, why don't we just open ourselves up to the full of community, the recovery community. Why don't we just have AA meetings here and Allen on meetings like we have been doing, that like other places are doing. And that's a little tough because the reason it's a little tough is because it would open people outside of our community to the mosque. But I think that's the medicine. I think we need it, we need it. And once everyone is ready, once we've had them regularly I can explain in detail why I think we need it. But I'll just say now that this is the medicine for our community. When you're starting something that is new and that that would be a bit new, that would be new for this community. It's hard for people to not show a self that they find to be perfect or what the side of themselves they want to present. You have to start out slow. So I think that it would be good to start with actually Allen on it because I feel like a lot of the people we've heard from are the families and the friends who are concerned about the people with addiction. Just my sense was that the people with the actual addiction are just very uncomfortable coming forward. If we get a sizable, I mean, it doesn't even have to be a ton of people but I think if once we start meetings for the families and the friends and we start creating environments where it's more comfortable with the person for the addiction to start talking about themselves and looking at themselves, then I think we'll go to the next step which would be the AA meetings and people who have other substance use issues will attend AA meetings. It's kind of a flexible program in that way because it's really the disease is the same. It's just a different substance. So as things progress, if we are successful we can expand to other meetings. I'm sure for people who have a sex addiction or the gambling addiction or I think AA is still fine for those people that they can still absolutely apply the principles and the steps but to do this with wisdom we have to start out. We have to start out one at a time and address the people who are ready and so that's the sense I've gotten. If we open this up to 12-step meetings for everybody it would be something that would happen even regardless of Muslim attendance. So people, we would still be helping people in the community, they would still see our mosque. There may be people who are curious or interested in Islam who are attending the 12-step meetings, they may meet other Muslims. I think even if no Muslims attend it'll still be good for our communities. That's it, hope I answered it. Just a really quick note about when we did The Friends and Family here just to give you an idea, 35 people showed interest like signing up, only about four or five showed up and one of the major hesitation, I mean we know people sign up for things that don't show up but that's a huge gap but one of the major themes of hesitation was is this really gonna be confidential? Are people gonna know about it? And this is just The Friends and Family, this is not the people who are struggling with the addiction themselves. And because the idea is, if people know okay that back room, that's where Dr. Ahmed and Rami were doing The Friends and Family and somebody walks up, oh that person's going to A Friends and Family, oh that must be their daughter or their husband or their wife. And so there is, there are a lot of things that we have to figure out how we're going to address but that was one of the concerns. The online component made it easier because then people could join in anonymously but then that in-person thing, you lose that component. Another question? So I was really struck by that 12-step program. I'd never, I'd heard of it many times but I hadn't actually sat down and listened to it and as I read it, I took a picture, I kept reading it and I said oh my God, this isn't for someone else. I need it, like I returned to myself in that moment and I realized like how much kibre, how much arrogance must there be when we're like this is for someone else? Like every Muslim, every spiritual human being, every seeker needs a 12-step program and you can fill in the blank, right? I think you kind of did, whether it's a behavior or a person, a substance. But I was struck just like in those few moments that you had it up, you know, concepts of taqwa, right? Concepts of muraqaba, concepts of hudur, just having presence and istighfar, true tobe, right? That's just incredible. So this is something universal. It transcends creeds. I completely understand that and I think it's so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about myself personally. I was actually brought to an Alanon meeting by a family member who was affected and that's sort of how I ended up starting actually and my grandfather died from alcoholism and he's in Pakistan actually. And so it's in my family, I never met him but I know now that I've been affected, I'm sure, by the disease because a parent grows up in that and then they develop kobe mechanisms and for that type of thing, they hide it, they don't talk about it and then you transfer it to your children. But when I saw the 12 steps, that's the exact same thing I thought, and no one was talking about religious things, no one was trying to convert me and I said, this is wisdom, this is good for me. There's nothing bad I see in this. And everybody who I dealt with and I was the minority, there was, I was the only brown person, only Muslim, only, it's just, yeah, I was the only person in a lot of my meetings and yet, and I was in a place where I was, that's why I feel a lot for people who are in, I know it's not easy being an immigrant in this country but it's really hard also being a first generation Muslim and then afterwards because your parents have a lot of anxieties and fears and there's a big cultural transition too. And this society, the way that it's structured is hard for a lot of people. Not just for Muslims, I would say, it's hard for the people living in it, it's just very non-natural. And so being able to figure out how to live in American society and Malcolm X touched on that is figuring out how to live in the society we're in now and be able to be healthy and happy is a true real struggle and I think some of us young people, we go to the sheikhs and we go to the imams and especially it's hard when you're a woman, actually a girl because the guys get access to the, I mean most of them are males, the sheikhs and so they can sometimes have the phone number or they can just sit right there in person and tell them everything, whatever they want but especially if you're a woman, finding somebody who can mentor you or who can support you and help guide you which that is a tradition in a Muslim culture, the sheikhs were not just scholars, there were two kinds, they're scholars and then there's basically life coaches, people who mentor you through spiritual development. I mean it's incredibly difficult for a young Muslim and especially if I think if you're a female, if you're a girl and so it's like you can feel like you're dying. The isolation just can really kill you and you don't want to lose your Islam but you want to be able to feel supported in belonging to something so you're kind of in this crossroads and it can break some people, it can break your psyche. It's like being on a shore between two rocks and the waves are coming from two different directions and I think it's happening, I think that's what's happening to a lot of people, young Muslims so. I think that what I like about this is it's very simple and it's structured and it's consistent and it's reliable. I think all the wisdom is there in our tradition and all these lectures and I think these sheikhs and these scholars have been working very hard for a long period of time to teach all this but I don't think listening to 20 lectures in a week is gonna do anything really. I think we're craving something that we can work and apply and this is just sort of the answer, the 21st century answer to being able to apply and understand Islam from Muslims living here now specific to this environment, right? So Islam can work for all times but sometimes we have to change our vehicle, change our methods but still convey the message so I think it's time for an update and I feel like this could be a good solution but we're all here just as the messengers, we have the, we're offering this so I don't have any stake in this at all. If everybody here wants it and I don't mean here, I mean in the community, if it's wanted we can, I don't have any doubts that we can make it happen. If people don't want it, if we're not interested, if we're not ready, it won't happen. It's as simple as that. So I have a question. So the masjid should be a safe place, a thriving space where the kids run around, they learn and you wanna have this as a safe space for like at the crossroads of spiritual intellectual crossroads. So speaking from a management, a board member, a trustee member viewpoint, we have a responsibility to protect the congregation at large from what's outside the door of the masjid. And we sometimes, I think we sometimes see ourselves as gatekeepers, almost to keep the world out and make the space a spiritual kind of homecoming each time a community member steps in the doors. So can you speak to the concern or the balance needed between the security and safety of keeping worshipers safe in the mosque and then inviting community members who are struggling with an addiction, which stereotypically, as we think as a rough, kind of uncouth person, a biker and leather gear, this is just what sometimes comes in mind when you think about addiction and who comes in here because you see the AA meetings and you think that's what it is. But can you just speak to the safety concerns that would come out of this? Just really quickly, I think that the image needs to be changed. How about the image of a hijabi going to Tarawih and she sees kids smoking marijuana in the parking lot at the masjid? And I'm not making that up. A hijabi who has previous addiction and sees marijuana users in the parking lot. How about something like that? Or how about people coming to the masjid high? Or how about high schoolers from Cal High, San Ramon High, Doherty Valley High that are going to the masjid and they had used, they've been exposed. We know from the Family Youth Institute, by college level, I think it's like what? 60% people are using over there. So it's already here. We don't need the biker pulling up at the back of MCC parking lot and walking in. People who are struggling with addiction are already in the masjid. They're already there. So I think the image needs to be changed. In terms of like how to address that, that's a good conversation that has to be had. Like does the community even want this at the masjid? Is it auxiliary? Do we do something? And now it's getting into logistics but like at Hub 925 and rent out of place so that also people feel like, okay, I can go to an MCC sponsored program, AA, but it's actually, you know, it's off location because we know that the friends and family, most people didn't show up because it was at the masjid. Other people actually felt comfortable being at the masjid. So this is the conversation like to, I think this is the beginning of a conversation and that logistical issues, that's how do we address that? If enough people are concerned, you know, from the board level down to the community congregate level and we all have this open, transparent conversation, we'll come up with a solution. I don't know what that solution is though. And to be creative, I think also having alternative models is really important. It realizing exactly what you said, we saw this with mental health, the years, in a shell of MCC, I have to say has been a pioneer and having, I hope they continue and having kind of mental health directly here on site. And that was exactly the same question that came up years ago of, should we allow this into the masjid door or not? Because again, the image exactly like this with your micro image, right? It's exactly like this. Somebody who has mental health is having an acute psychotic break and that is like the smallest, tiny sliver of a percent of all the rest of us, actually literally all the rest of us who have a mental health concern. And if you think I'm sounding really strange, mental health, under the umbrella of mental health is everything from actual clinical diagnosis like depression, anxiety, trauma, et cetera. So is parenting. So is dealing with your rebellious teenagers. So is marital concerns. So you see very quickly, we all have mental health considerations, masha'Allah. So when people start saying, we don't want that in the masjid, it's like, are you saying you don't wanna be at the masjid? Like what does that mean even, right? But being, you know, respectful of different needs that we all have and alternative creative measures, right? Of understanding that we found in the mental health space that literally half of the people who came to mental health services would not come in unless it was at the masjid because there was still that stigma. And so they felt that if it was in the masjid and it was by Muslims and it was people they saw and knew and trusted and saw at prayers and other places, then it must be safe or okay enough to bring my family to it. Then there was the other half of the community who didn't wanna be seen here and didn't want their mental health considerations and substance abuse as one of them, right? To be at a place where other people from the community could see them. So we actually set up models where we had clinics, literally mental health treatment centers that are within the masjid and other ones that were in standalone buildings completely separate outside so that people can choose depending on what their comfort is. And maybe that's what needs to happen. But you don't, again, stick your head in the sand and say we're not gonna do any of this or this is not part of our community or Muslims don't have this. No, no, no, no, I'm a shell block, right? What you do instead is you really think about the alternatives and figure out who needs what. And that's what the job, my all do deference and respect to our boards and leadership, that is the job of leadership. What do your congregants need? And then to think creatively of how to solve those issues. Ciao. I'm just gonna quickly add something if that's okay. I'll be very quick. I grew up in Canada and every time somebody would ask me, but where are you from? I'm like, Canada. And they're like, oh, you don't look Canadian. I'm like, what does Canadian look like? And so I challenge that same concept right now. Well, what is somebody who's struggling with addiction look like? How do you know? You're not gonna see. You're not gonna walk up to you and say, hey, how's it going? My name is Mona, I'm struggling with addiction. They're not gonna do that, right? So really ask yourself, do we have this image? Brother Manu, you brought up the biker. It killed me. You know why? Because I ride a motorcycle. I ride a motorcycle. And if I pulled up into the machine with my motorcycle, I promise you, if I took that helmet off and people see the hijab, they're like, what? And she has, by the way. This is very vested. Masha'Allah. So I challenge, what kind of perceptions do we have of people who look a certain way and as Muslim, as a visibly Muslim woman myself, I don't want anybody looking at me and like, she looks kind of dangerous. So don't do that to other people within your community because we don't like it when it's done to us. And so I promise you, individuals who struggle with addiction, they don't want you to look at them and be like, you look like somebody who's struggling with addiction. So really just checking our own biases. Masha'Allah at the end of this today as well. Okay, JazakAllah. So we are two minutes away from Zohar prayer. So I know there's more questions in the room, but hopefully the panelists can stick around for a moment and answer those. We really just round of applause for the panelists. Very, very insightful. Thank you. So we'll wrap up, JazakAllah, head and we hope to continue this conversation. Can I share like a du'a that I wrote for this to end? Okay. So, oh God, ya Allah, let the message you have sent us with reach the hearts of these people, not just their heads, grant the coolness of peace to their minds and anxieties. Relieve us all of the disease of addiction and obsession with other than you. Relieve us of the toxicity of obsession with ourselves and self-sufficiency. You are always with us, God, ya Allah, but help us to always be with you. Help us to see, feel and know that you are available as our greatest friend and supporter. Ya Allah, oh God, Lord of the worlds, grant us the serenity moving forward to accept the things that we cannot change, the courage to change the things that we can and the wisdom to know the difference. Amin.