By Ahmed J.

A well-meaning religious counselor once advised me to consider getting married in order to overcome my porn addiction. After no luck giving it up, I considered marriage and pursued a courtship – only to realize half way in the process that I was still watching it. If I couldn’t stop while I was in a relationship with a real woman, who’s to say I would stop if we got married? I knew at that point that my behavior wasn’t just a bad habit; it was an addiction that had a life of its own – I was completely powerless over it and I couldn’t stop no matter how bad I tried.

It’s a common misconception that providing a halal avenue to carry out ones’ sexual needs will get rid of one’s desire to watch pornography. I realized that wasn’t the case for me and didn’t’ go through with the marriage. I turned to religion and spirituality for help, sought sacred knowledge and the company of scholars. I even travelled abroad and spent time studying in Africa; I thought if I’d cut myself off from the world and immersed in spirituality, I’d be cured. People started calling me a ‘student of knowledge’ and seeing me as a pious person because I was around old religious men all the time. Little did they know that I was around the scholars because I was in a far greater need of them than anyone else; were it not for their company, I would have gone completely astray.

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Unfortunately, none of this directly helped me cure my addiction to pornography. Yes, I gained beneficial knowledge and I believe it was the blessings and prayers of the righteous that eventually put me on the path to recovery. However, my addiction to pornography remained and I continued to indulge in it by night. The feeling of guilt and hypocrisy only grew with time. I almost lost all hope as I had tried everything in my will to cure this problem. And then it hit me, the most obvious thing which I had never bothered trying, and the one thing that has made all the difference: getting help from another person.

The embarrassing nature of this addiction had meant that I never honestly confided in anyone the true nature of my problem. I was relying on myself to give it up, I never turned to another person to ask for help for this specific problem. Wonderous things happen when you swallow your pride and accept your powerlessness.

I am a recovering sex addict, and here are the steps I took to achieve sobriety from pornography, compulsive masturbation and other unwanted sexual behaviors:

1) Get help from other people

This addiction thrives in secrecy and isolation; you must end this secrecy to start the process of recovery. For years I made the mistake we all addicts make: trying to quit it on our own. After realizing I needed help, I started with the obvious things: self-help websites and online programs that cater to Muslims, like Purify Your Gaze. While these helped me get an understanding of my problem and gave me a guide that I could potentially follow to sober up, it ultimately did not work. Why? Because I still had to rely on myself to stay sober and follow through with the regimes they laid out. Online programs give you access to a web forum where you can chat with other addicts, seminars to listen to and the occasional call with a councilor which comes with a hefty price tag. However, at the end of the day, you are still alone and stuck with a computer and the internet – these are the very things I was trying to get away from!

This is when I started looking for off-line recovery; somewhere I could find local people who I could work with towards sobriety. I started exploring anonymous 12-step programs designed for sex addicts. I was hesitant at first and my ego kept getting in the way; I thought I wasn’t as bad as ‘those addicts’, but since nothing had worked, this was my only hope. There are several 12-step sex recovery programs out there with various definitions of sobriety and cater to different audiences. I finally found one that works for me and I believe it will for most Muslims. It is called SA: Sexaholics Anonymous

SA is a fellowship of addicts who admit to being powerless over their lusts and work together to overcome addiction to things like pornography, masturbation and illicit relations. They define sobriety as having no form of sex with one-self or with partners other than the spouse; “spouse” is defined to be one’s partner in a marriage between a man and a woman. Given this strict definition, most people that attend SA meetings have a religious background. Luckily for me, the fellowship in my neighborhood is made up almost entirely of strict Hassidic Jews! It is ironic that of all the religious company that I sought, it is the company of an orthodox Jew, my current sponsor, that finally put me on the path to recovery from pornography.

In the SA fellowship, I’ve found all that I was looking for in a recovery program. It is completely free of cost and has introduced me to committed people within my neighborhood who I can work with. Since I live in a big city, we have several anonymous meetings a week that I can attend at my convenience; they are held in churches, synagogues and in rented community centers. Most recently, a fellow Muslim member of SA started meetings at an Islamic community centre as well. The program has forced me to physically get out of the isolation of my dark room and has given me a support network of some incredible people I can rely on. SA has worked for me, and the remaining wisdoms I share below will be based on my experiences in the program.

2) Find a sponsor and call them daily

A sponsor is someone who holds you accountable for your sobriety and helps you work through the 12-steps. Two months of attending weekly SA meetings, I found they alone were not helping me stay sober. I had to find someone who I would commit to working the program and building a personal relationship. In SA meetings, senior members who’ve accumulated decent sobriety usually volunteer to take on new members. If you choose not to join SA, find someone from your social circle you can rely on: this can be a friend, Imam, spouse, family member etc. I highly recommend getting the White Book and Step-into-Action and working through these with your sponsor.

In early stages of your recovery, you must call your sponsor every day to check-in with them. Checking in means to give them a call and let them know how you’re holding up that day and if you’ve stayed sober. If you’ve lost sobriety, you MUST tell them what happened. You can’t recover unless you start being honest. Your sponsor is supposed to talk you through what triggered you and figure out how to avoid it again. If you don’t share with them that you acted out, you’ll never recover. This step of sharing with another human being my darkest secret was the hardest thing for me to do – and it is the one thing that helped me stay sober. Every time I wanted to act out, I would think about the embarrassing experience of telling my sponsor that ‘I did it again’. I could no longer keep acting out in secret; this crucial change has made all the difference for me.

3) Set a sobriety date and take it one day at a time

SA’s matra of being sober is: one day at a time. It is one of the most powerful concepts I have found in my recovery. While we must intend that our long-term goal is to give up pornography for good, as someone who’s deeply addicted, it is foolish to set a ‘quit date’ where you decide to give it all up and pretend like you’ll never return to it. Truth be told, our claim of quitting is often insincere because part of us can’t bear the thought of never watching porn again. I pretty much vowed never to return to porn on a weekly basis for seven years; I would relapse with a far greater sense of guilt and depression every time because I felt I had betrayed a promise I made to God. Forever seems too long for us and never is just too hard. Like they say in SA, ‘Stopping is easy. Staying stopped is the hard part’.

Taking it ‘one day at time’ means your goal is to stay sober for just one day – only 24 hours. No long-term sobriety targets of going for two weeks, a month or six months without porn. You just have to stay sober for a day. At the end of the 24 hours you are free to choose: do you want to stay sober for another 24 hours or no? If you decided yes, then you put your energy into staying sober for another 24 hours. Going through the daily sobriety renewal with your sponsor during your daily call is an excellent practice. The practice of taking it one day at a time means you’re never under the illusion that you ‘quit porn’. You’re always on thin ice and you’ll fall right back to where you started if you don’t actively work on taking care of yourself. To track your progress, you should set a ‘sobriety date’. This is the date you last acted out and it should be renewed every time you relapse. With God’s grace, you will see that the period of time between each relapse will grow longer and longer as you progress in your recovery.

4) Define Sobriety: Don’t try to separate pornography and masturbation

One of the biggest mistakes I was making when trying to give up porn on my own was that I defined staying sober as ‘staying away from porn’. But porn and masturbation are inherently related for most addicts – one eventually leads to the other. Masturbation is always accompanied with lustful fantasizing which either leads to pornography or other forms of unwanted sexual behavior. You should instead use the following definition: staying sober means no sex with one-self or others except the spouse. This technically means you could watch porn and stay ‘sober’ but that is just being dishonest and there is only so long before you end up masturbating. If you are the rare breed that is only addicted to watching porn (and not masturbating), you should modify your sobriety definition with your sponsor to include pornography in it as well.

5) Read this prayer when lustful thoughts come to you

One of the spiritual sages I met advised me to recite the following prayer of the Prophet :

O Ever-Living, O Sustainer! I call upon Your mercy for and I seek refuge from Your punishment. Rectify all my affairs and do not entrusts me to myself or to any of Your creation for even the blink of an eye. Yā Ḥayyu yā Qayyūm, bi-raḥmatika astaghīth, wa min ʿadhābika astajīr, aṣliḥ lī shaʾnī kullah, wa lā takilnī ilā nafsī wa lā ilā aḥadan min khalqika ṭarfata ʿayn.

Another very useful prayer is the following:

My Lord! I seek Your protection against the insinuations of the devils and I seek your protection against them approaching me. (23:97-98)

I recite these repeatedly whenever I am triggered or lustful thoughts enter my mind. I have found consistently that these thoughts go away and I get distracted by something else after reading the prayers. These prayers can be found in many collections of daily supplications. I personally recite it from the collection of Imam al-Haddad called Wird-al-Latif. If you don’t already have a routine of reciting supplications, I highly recommend incorporating this collection in your daily routine. It has all the important prayers the Prophet advised for daily recital and takes only a few minutes to complete.

6) Install the K9 Web Filter on your computer

Of all the filters I experimented with, this is the most effective one and comes free of cost. I installed it on my machine, set a jumbled-up password I couldn’t remember and then put my parents email as the recovery account. There’s no way I am calling them in the middle of the night to recover my password; the time I am usually most vulnerable.

7) Your smart phone has to go; ideally, the internet in your house too

I resisted this for the longest time; I thought I could manage to hold onto my smart phone. I tried all kinds of filters, locks and productivity applications. I would find a loop hole every time and ultimately realized that my sobriety mattered far more than being able to use google maps, check my emails or respond to WhatsApp groups. Plus, these phones provide access to non-pornographic material such as YouTube and Instagram which can act as triggers. So, the smart phone went away and I got an old-fashioned phone (I managed to find one with a keyboard) which I only use to make old-fashioned phone calls. After I made progress in my recovery, I only allowed myself a smart phone at work and I still only use the non-smart phone when at home.

In addition, for the first several months into the program I did not have internet at my house. It was challenging but necessary, as I simply couldn’t be alone with the internet at that time. My house then became a safe space and I was completely off the grid: no internet, no smart phones and no distractions. After accumulating some sobriety, I did allow myself cable internet. However, I still don’t have a Wi-Fi connection at home as I fear I might use handheld devices to act out.

8) Stop feeding your lust

‘I’ll act out this one last time and get it out of my system so I can focus again’, this was a common justification I would use to give into my cravings. There’s no ‘one last time’. The more you feed your lust, the stronger the cravings will be the next time the temptation returns. Imam Busiri’s words in his famous Burda are the best piece of advice in this case:

Don’t attempt to break the desires by indulging in disobedience For food only strengthens a glutton’s craving The self is like a child -if you leave it, it will grow up wanting to suckle But if you wean it, it will lose its desire for the breast

Once you stop feeding your lust through hardcore porn and masturbation, you will incline towards feeding it using other means. This could include activities such as: voyeurism, stalking people both off-line and on social media, engaging in virtual sex and fantasy, watching ‘softcore’ material, visiting strip clubs and seeking out illicit relationships. So, after getting a degree of sobriety from the hardcore pornographic material, you must slowly work towards achieving sobriety of the mind by eliminating these behaviors. If you don’t fix these, you will slowly fall back into the hardcore material and will return to square one.

9) Work on purifying your heart and removing your character defects

Attaining physical sobriety is only the beginning of the recovery process. Years of exposure to pornography has deeply damaged our hearts and spirits. We have to purify our hearts by increasing our zikr and prayers on the Prophet. Like other forms of addiction, the nature of this problem has only intensified our preexisting poor character. We must confront our selfishness, dishonesty, pride, anger, inconsiderateness and arrogance. Steps 4 to 9 of the program our designed to help us take a moral inventory of our actions, address our shortcomings and make amends with those we’ve wronged. This is the heart of recovery; so be sure to work through these steps slowly and carefully with your sponsor.

10) Don’t be fooled by early success; sobriety is a lifelong commitment.

Once I attainted some decent sobriety, I stopped going to meetings and working the program. Why put all that effort in when I no longer watch porn? I could go on for months without watching it now. I thought I was ‘cured’. All I had to do now was just get married and I won’t have to work so hard on staying celibate.

So, I went out looking for a spouse again thinking I was cured. I relaxed the strict rules I had imposed on myself, allowed myself masturbation periodically and stopped keeping track of my sobriety date. I soon realized after going ‘out there’ that getting married isn’t a simple business and it doesn’t just happen with the snap of a finger. I grew frustrated, I stopped taking care of my recovery and slowly but surely, I fell right back to the dark place where I started. For us addicts, ‘reduction’ is simply not an option – we allow ourselves ‘one drink’ and that’s enough to get us back to square one.

Don’t make that mistake. I had to pick myself up again, recommit to sobriety and started taking active care of myself. While reasons for committing to sobriety are obvious when your life is out of control, this becomes more challenging as you progress and your temptations are not as intense as they used to be. I am sober today for different reasons. I am sober because I’ve come to accept that I might never be ‘cured’ and I need to keep track of my sobriety to ensure I don’t go back to where I started. I am sober because I know it takes time to find the right person and I must learn to control my desires – lest I rush into a marriage for lowly reasons. More importantly, it is because I realize I have to exercise control over my lust even after marriage. I am no longer under the illusion that marriage is some form of unrestricted access to sex which will satiate all my base desires. If I can’t control my desires as a single person, I won’t be able to control them after marriage either and will end up engaging in sexually unwanted behaviors. Ultimately, my sobriety is for God’s sake and to earn His pleasure – these practical reasons outlined are simply a functional tool, for those of us weak in faith, to make the connection to our motivation more accessible.

My fellow addicts, don’t give up on your recovery. Sobriety is possible and it is a beautiful thing; I am living proof of that. Follow what I have outlined above and you will see that change is in fact possible. It will take time: I spent seven years struggling on my own and have been on the SA program for almost three years now with real results. Don’t make the mistakes I made; get help and work with someone to overcome this sick addiction. There’s hope for all of us and with God’s help, all is possible. I remind myself of the words of Imam Busiri when I am short on hope, I pray you find comfort in them as well:

O soul, do not become despondent due to your grievous sins –

When God forgives, even mortal sins become mere blunders.

Perhaps the mercy of my Lord when handed out,

Would be distributed in proportion to one’s sins.

My Lord! Don’t make my hope in you deterred,

And don’t leave my expectations unfulfilled!

Ahmed J. is a porn addict in recovery and a member of Sexaholics Anonymous. He blogs about his experiences in recovery at Jihad Against Porn