The Three-Stage Model Explained
The Empty Space After Decentering
Healthy Ego Versus Self Erasure
Fear-Based Faith And Spiritual Shame
Jalali And Jamali Names Of Allah
Coherence Creates Better Relationships
Restoring Proper Order And Dignity
Closing Du’a And Farewell
SPEAKER_00 0:04
Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Kamal Akar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. So in the previous podcast about decentering men, we diagnosed male centrism, what that looks like, what the patterns are, where your emotional stability orbits around a man. In this episode, we move into treatment. The disclaimer being that decentering men is not a rebellion against men, and this is not about withdrawing from relationships with men. This is the process of restoring the correct psychological and the spiritual order inside your life as a woman so that you can be stronger in your relationships with men and be more loving. Many Muslim women don't realize that men have become this center because the orbit will appear in multiple forms like longing, anxiety, resentment, hypervigilance, constant analysis of the male behavior. One of the deepest confusions in relationships is mistaking psychological orbit for emotional closeness. And it doesn't matter if that emotion is positive or negative, it is the defining feature of this orbiting and this male centrism. The mind continually circles the same reference point and your emotions seem to be dependent on the situation, especially the situation that involves a man. This orbiting creates psychological dependency because the mind begins regulating itself through another person's reactions, and this disguises itself as intimate close relationship when it's the opposite. Healthy relationship emerges when two individuals stand independently in their own right and values while relating to one another through clarity. When you're centering men in your life, the foundation is your own fractured identity. Decentering men restores your coherence by returning to your attention to yourself and ultimately to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And this is the topic for today. The correct treatment plan if you carry the diagnosis of male centrism. The foundational problem that we're trying to correct while decentering men is related to the collapse of the woman's identity. Male centrism for women does not begin with a man, it begins with the absence of a stable sense of self. Muslim women from a very young age are socialized to minimize their own preference and authority, and with that upbringing your value becomes tied to being chosen, being approved of, especially being protected by a man. Over time this conditioning produces an identity crisis that primarily only exists in reference to men. And when your identity is externally organized in this way, your nervous system becomes fragile. So the treatment here really is building a healthy sense of self. So think of it as a triad, a three staged model. Male centered identity, which is the external orbit, we already talked about how to diagnose it. Then there's a self-centered stabilization, which is a level of internal coherence, which is about building a healthy ego. Then finally there's a law centered alignment, which is the spiritual axis, which is you holding on to the rope of Allah. We're going to be talking about creating a strong and a healthy sense of self as a part of the treatment of male centrism. Then finally how that elevates your relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. When you start this work of decentering men and that orbit starts to break, when men are no longer the gravitational center, something very unfamiliar appears, and that is your internal space. Your mind that was using men as the target of thinking now has less and less to think about. That space will feel stabilizing at first because the mind has been trained to orient itself towards something that is now not present. I always tell you guys that your mind can't work with the absence of something, so then you would have to fill the center with something. What would that center be? What would that look like? Just because the mind is designed to orbit, it's designed to make something the center, it needs something to focus on. So if you start to decenterment, you can't live in a void because that has the potential of destabilizing your whole nervous system. Meaning if the gravitational pull all of a sudden disappears without a healthy replacement, then there's a risk of identity crisis happening, which is very difficult to go through. So what I'm telling you today in this podcast is that this center has to be replaced by your own self. Self with a capital S, the healthy sense of self. If you remove men from the throne of your subconscious mind, and if I ask you as a Muslim woman, who do you think that center should be replaced by? Who is that one being that we are always working to structure our life around? Whose rope is it that we're working really hard to hold tightly to? The answer would be Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. That's who should replace the center. And that would absolutely be correct, but not before you have done some inner work. And this is where the controversy might come in if you take what I'm teaching out of context. And this is the whole reason why I'm dedicating a whole episode to this concept alone. So that women who want to understand can see why what I'm suggesting is important. I'm building this context because what I'm suggesting is when you decenter men from your life and you have to do it, even if you don't think you do, you still do. Because if you are alive on this planet this long, especially if you've lived in a Muslim majority culture, you would absolutely need to decenter men. Okay, so I digress. When you decenter men, you will have an empty space, and then you will fill that space with yourself. You center yourself. Ah, I know, what are you saying? How can you even say that? This is so selfish, so narcissistic even. I know, I know, it sounds that way. But please hear me out. You center yourself until you have built a healthy sense of self. A healthy ego is simply a stable sense of self. It is the ability to say I exist without over apologizing for that existence. It is knowing your preferences, your limits, your convictions, your desires, your values, and allowing them to take up space, allowing your safety, allowing your rest, all without guilt. Chances are up until now you've only been praised to accommodate, to be agreeable, how endlessly patient you are, and you're rewarded for this type of shrinking. And the more invisible you become, the more virtuous you're considered. So then in that case you've lost all sense of self, all sense of what it feels like to be you in your body, with your likes and your dislikes. The way you want to exist doesn't even exist in your vocabulary. So when you don't have a sense of self, little less a healthy sense of self, a woman without this healthy relationship cannot relate to Allah in an abundant way. If you don't know how your mind works, what your heart desires, what you prefer, you will only relate to Allah as dictated by a man. And usually in the current world, a man's sense of self is very inflated, especially in Muslim cultures. So then the way you learn to relate to Allah is through fear, because men sometimes need to shave some of their ego down in order to humble themselves in front of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So the same teaching gets passed down to women as well, because of course, in a man centered world, what else can be correct other than a way a man tells you what a healthy spirituality looks like? And from a man's lens, the ego needs to be deflated. It needs to be brought down a few notches, if you will. So when a woman who's already drowning in self erasure tries to relate to her faith through more self erasure, then you cannot successfully do it, because a lot of times there's nothing else left to give. And from that follows endless shame. And the internal dialogue that ensues is that you start to think as a woman, since everybody else seems to be telling you to do this, it seems like the right thing to do, but I can't seem to be able to do this, so I must not be a good Muslim. Which is completely unnecessary and super unhealthy. In reality, not everyone needs to relate to Allah through a smaller sense of self. Maybe sometimes only men need to do that. And here again I'm making general statements. A feminine way of relating to Allah through softness, acceptance, mercy, Allah's attributes that are categorized into the Jalali qualities and there are other qualities called the Jamali qualities, and this represents a balance between an awe inspiring power of Allah and His merciful love. The Jalali qualities are attributes that signify Allah's supreme power, grandeur, like Al Jabbar, the irresistible, the compeller, the one who forces his will, Al Kah, the subduer, the prevailing, the one who dominates all Al Mutakabir, the majestic supreme, the one supreme in greatness, Al Jalil, the majestic, the sublime, the one with the ultimate dignity and rank. Then there are the Jamali qualities. These attributes highlight Allah's compassion, grace, like al Rahman, the compassionate, the most gracious, the beneficent, Al Rahim, the merciful, Al Wadud, the loving, Al Rafar, the forgiving, Al Latif, the most subtle and courteous, Al Wahab, the bestower, the supreme giver, Al Karim, the generous, the bountiful. When women try to get close to Allah through the male centered worldview, they see their relationship with Allah through his Jalali qualities, and that is extremely detrimental to a feminine psyche already struggling to breathe, already struggling to take up even a small amount of space. If you don't build yourself compassion for your existence, you will only be able to relate to Allah through fear, through shame, through anxiety, of not being enough. If you don't have a sense of healthy ego, your spirituality will become compromised. You will engage in worship only to soothe your insecurity. When you practice your faith through a fractured identity, you do not experience Allah's mercy as expansively as you can. Mostly you connect through guilt, and you interpret your hardship as a proof of your inadequacy. The world of Allah's abundance, His generosity, His gentleness, His mercy remains inaccessible because you're filtering everything through self-doubt. A spiritual existence that is constantly in fear is exhausting and is not sustainable. What I'm asking here is when you decenter men and then center yourself, you're not becoming arrogant. You are becoming coherent. And this is the distinction that creates the huge difference. For women, especially those socialized to equate goodness with self sacrifice, the very idea of centering yourself will feel dangerous, and it will feel spiritually suspicious. But what most women have been taught is not humility, it's self erasure. And that makes you really good at consulting your environment and calculating your reactions before you consult yourself, so much so that your self confidence completely disappears. Decentering men here creates the first opening. When men are no longer this axis of your nervous system, then you are reclaiming your own attention. That is a huge win because this attention is your currency. That reclaimed attention is where your selfhood can rebuild. Centering yourself does not mean hyperinflating yourself. It means stabilizing yourself to stand on a strong foundation. What that might start to look like is that you'll stop ruminating every time you're criticized, and you will stop overfunctioning just to prove your worth. What that would look like is that you will begin to make decisions from your own values alignment rather than anxiety of somebody else's reaction. You begin asking what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala requires of you, not what the men around you will tolerate. The deeper change here is then that you're not reducing an oversized ego, which is most likely not the case. Again, it might be true in some women's cases, but rather what you're doing is allowing your coherent self to exist at all. If you're functioning as the rarity with an inflated but fragile sense of self, or the one that has a fractured, almost non existent sense of self, you know which one you are. Majority of the time women are of the latter kind. And if that is you, when you learn to recognize your own voice, your own limits, then you are not becoming arrogant, you're becoming visible, visible enough just to yourself. And this visibility is what creates the internal stability necessary to relate to others. And from that you start to relate to Allah from a place of peace. When you develop a healthy sense of ego, your spirituality begins to reorganize, and this will internally shift how devotion feels to you. In that case, your worship will no longer function as a compensation of your feeling inadequate. Just so you can get closer to Allah, your worship emerges from a coherent self. When you are grounded in that way, you can love others endlessly, you can give endlessly, even to men, specially to men, if that's what you choose to do. If your goal is to repair your relationships with men without dissolving into them, this is how you do it. This way you can extend forgiveness without erasing your own boundaries. So what appears on the surface when you're decentering men through this treatment is that it looks like you're centering yourself, but you're not choosing your ego over God. You're building the internal structure that allows divine recognition to occur without external distortion. When you develop your capacity and allow yourself to exist as a stable, dignified creation, you gain the lens through which the magnitude of your creator's mercy becomes visible. Your wholeness then is not even remotely arrogant, because it is your healing, through which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's love and mercy becomes real. As you begin to center your healthy self, your orientation will naturally turn towards Allah. When men no longer are there to determine your worth or make you feel insecure or otherwise pronounce your stability, the direction you return to will be its proper place, the trust in Allah, and that will replace all of your anxieties. From this steadiness, your love that you have to give to others becomes very, very genuine. You can care deeply without overcalculating all of your actions and your worth. And the type of love that emerges from this identity is not desperate, it's not even strategic, it's not transactional, it's simply free to give. It's simply available for other human beings to profit off of because you have so much of it to give. There is a huge difference between a healthy ego and an inflated ego that is otherwise fragile. And I will not give this recommendation to everyone. This type of teaching and guidance is not universal in the same way for everyone. Many men already live from a socially reinforced center of the self that can easily slide into entitlement or inflation. Their spiritual work often involves softening that center, learning humility, accountability, to restrain themselves from their sense of authority over others so that it does not overshadow their own relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. For them and for women who are otherwise operating from an inflated ego, the path towards healthy spirituality includes bringing the ego down so that the faith can emerge without their distortion of dominance and superiority. This, however, is usually not the path that most Muslim women need to take in order to get closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You cannot know Allah from a fragmented self. You will continue to fall into spiritual shame because your man is disappointed in you, and you will start to equate that that Allah is disappointed in you. Facing constant shame as a fuel to your faith will burn you out, and that way you will risk losing your faith altogether. And in the rare case that you are holding on to it, from your own self confidence and authority, faith will become less transactional, less filtered through another human's authority, and your spirituality as a woman will become anchored directly in your relationship with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. This is the paradox of decentering. Having gone through this triangulation successfully, diagnosing male centeredness, creating a healthy sense of self, and then relating to Allah through your own authority. From there the relationships with men in your life will become stronger and peaceful. The paradox of this process is that relationship with men will improve, because in that space men around you no longer need to behave a certain way in order for you to feel loved. You are already loved endlessly by Allah, and you get to see all of that mercy through a sense of a healthy self. If your identity and stability are anchored internally, then men no longer need to be tasked with regulating your emotional state. This in itself removes an enormous weight and pressure from your relationships. Then inevitably your love becomes less anxious because it no longer carries the burden of divining you. In this restoration of the correct order of decentering men, it restores the hierarchy that was previously inverted. Male centered cultures have narrowed this pathway by teaching women that your access to Allah must pass through a man. Authority, interpretation, validation, what your worship should look like are all framed as male mediated. This leaves women feeling that their relationship with Allah is dependent on a male's approval. So while decentering men appears rebellious at first glance, it is completely the opposite of that. It is realignment. You are restoring the proper order within your inner world. The irony here is once your worth is not outsourced to men and not even entirely contained within yourself, this is where you begin to recognize the source, the source that is Allah. You see that your dignity did not come from a male selecting you, and it did not disappear because a male rejected you. Your dignity came from being created intentionally by Allah. When that happens alongside a clear separation between Allah and men, the one profound thing that happens is that your faith stabilizes, and then you no longer confuse disappointment in a man with disappointment in God. You no longer interpret a male weakness with divine injustice. You stand on firm ground. Faith becomes vertical between you and Allah instead of horizontal that is dependent on how men behave around you and what they approve of you. So the controversy that I am trying to erase here is that women must temporarily center themselves after decentering men, but that is done only to show you when the self becomes structurally stable, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala becomes the ultimate axis, the ultimate center. With that I pray to Allah, Ya Allah, remove from my heart any attachment that distorts my center. Teach me to act from my values, not from the reaction of others. Strengthen my sense of self, so I may stand in clarity and dignity that you have offered me. Anchor my heart only in you, so that my peace and my direction come from you alone. Amin Yarabul Amin. Please keep me in your du'as. I'll talk to you guys next time.
