Why write about my experience?
Someone sent me three great questions.
Someone sent me three great questions.
1. What do you gain by exposing this cult other than personal relief? You indicated previously how difficult it is to get people out of a cult.
2. Why do people stay in the cult even after you’ve exposed them especially since you were his right-hand man?
3. Did they benefit the ummah at all? Have they changed their ways?
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Here are my answers:
“1. What do you gain by exposing this cult other than personal relief? You indicated previously how difficult it is to get people out of a cult.”
- For personal relief from trauma or stress, I highly recommend expressive writing. For this, you do not share your writing with others. I use this technique regularly for any kind of stress in my life now. [https://www.psychologytoday.com/.../expressive-writing]
- There are multiple benefits to exposing high control groups. I avoid using the word “cult” because I realized it carries different connotations for different people. A student of Husain once told me that Husain’s students were not a cult because they were not like Jim Jones’s group. I realized they had a different definition of the term. I think saying “high control group” is more precise.
- Getting someone out of a high control group is difficult in my experience. But exposing the group allows anyone considering joining the group a more accurate understanding of it. I think if an average person knew what was involved, they would not join. In my case, I researched both Husain and Zulfiqar. I did not find any material specifically criticizing them. Multiple people told me generally what Sufi groups were like and all of their criticisms proved true in the case of Zulfiqar and Husain. By the time they told me, though, I was attached to Zulfiqar and Husain. I assumed those general criticisms did not apply to Zulfiqar and Husain. By naming the group and its leaders, people have a better chance of avoiding harm.
- Some high control groups hide their internal structure. When I helped Husain raise funds to build the Sacred Learning Sufi training facility, they called it a “masjid project.” Exposing a high control group allows local communities to make an informed decision about their level of engagement with that group. In particular, they can decide if they want to support it financially or politically. Masjids in the USA almost always must interact with the local government and that usually means they need community support.
- For people who have left a high control group, it can be socially isolating. That is a difficult thing to put yourself or your family through. So knowing you are not alone helps. Many people have contacted me privately telling me how much it helped to learn about my story. Some were former students of Zulfiqar or Husain, like me, but most were from other groups.
“2. Why do people stay in the cult even after you’ve exposed them especially since you were his right-hand man?”
When you say “right-hand man,” I think you mean that I was close to Husain. That is true. I would not call myself his right-hand man since there were a handful of his servant students who were particularly close to him in addition to me. Regardless, I interacted with him frequently and tried to serve him and his family.
When I left him and told a few people what I discovered, I found that most people I talked to chose to stay with him. Initially, I could not understand why anyone would stay with him after learning what happened. But I realized they have their reasons to stay. They typically said, “I’m benefitting from him so I’ll stay with him.” I think anyone outside the group would find this illogical, but these people went to Husain for a reason in the first place. My experience is that these people, like me, had their own serious problems in their lives. I think of it as having a dictator. A dictator of a country does some horrible things. But removing the dictator without a replacement (as happened with Saddam Hussein in Iraq) creates new problems because of the ensuing anarchy, insecurity and violence. Whatever the real reason is for them staying with a manipulative controlling shaykh, we probably cannot do much about it beyond dua.
“3. Did they benefit the ummah at all? Have they changed their ways?”
- I think they have benefited the ummah. To this day, there are things I got from them no one else provided for me. That’s why people are attracted to them and devote their lives to them. For example, they helped me learn how to focus on Allah during prayer. I literally could never do that before. And that’s a huge benefit. The issue is that along with benefit, they harm. I think of it like alcohol and gambling. Allah says that there is some benefit in those things, but the harm outweighs the benefit (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:219). For example, it doesn’t make sense to experience spiritual ecstasy if your iman (faith) is at risk because you have focused your life on the shaykh instead of on Allah.
- I do not know whether they have changed their ways. I intentionally do not follow anything Zulfiqar and Husain do. Instead, I do dua that Allah protects the ummah from their harm.