‘Our therapeutic direction is towards Light’: transcendence and a non‐secular politics of difference in Islamic Counselling training

Abstract

AbstractThe Islamic Counselling training model discussed in this article first emerged in 1990s multicultural Britain within the newly expanding field of cross‐cultural counselling and psychotherapy. It is informed by classical Sufi notions of the self, the development of an Islamic psychology, and decolonial scholarship. Based on ethnographic research on the current training in Islamic Counselling, this article explores the ways in which this model trains students to engage with relational differences through non‐secular notions of reality, the self, and its relation to multiple others. Differences are made sense of through notions of ‘worldview’ and ‘journey’ that go beyond categories of culture, religion, and race, and while these differences are similarly ‘acknowledged’, there is also the possibility of surpassing them through an experiential process of ‘witnessing’. Islamic Counselling's therapeutic goal, therefore, is not the forging of a pious self, but transcendence: the establishing of a deeply felt understanding of Oneness or Truth. Through this process, Islamic Counselling holds difference and connection in view simultaneously, while challenging a relativist notion of cultural difference inherent in ethno‐psychiatry and cross‐cultural counselling. It offers a radically new mode of relating with differences within and beyond the counselling setting.