I remember reading The Handmaid's Tale when I was a teenager, forgetting all about it, and the plot only recently coming back to me. If you're on social media as a Muslim, you would have seen the plethora of faith-based content, much of which is ridiculous debates on stuff like whether women should be allowed to wear a backpack over their coats/abayas without it compromising modesty.
This isn't new. Before my website and before my spiritual social media presence, I was an angry Arab journalist with thousands of followers on Twitter, who had countless debates, got into arguments daily and had 50+ notifications a day arguing with strangers about politics, faith, feminism and identity. I don't even remember their names, and my views have changed dramatically since then.
Since my online debating days, these have transcended beyond 140 characters and into TikTok videos and Instagram reels. The scary thing about this is that people are being doxxed, faces are becoming so public and loud voices with audacious opinions are becoming role models to the community.
I have routinely told people to disengage and block these people, but with them infiltrating everyone's timelines, it's almost impossible to ignore. The first time I did this in ages was when an influencer/sheikha Duaa Ahmad came for a Muslim fitness influencer for allegedly not wearing a proper hijab. The anger in her eyes in that video was almost scary, and when I commented, all she could say was: 'if you do not have anger in ur heart when u see the haram, then u r not a full believer' (sic).
Seeing someone base being a full believer based on how angry you get at hijabi women in fitness living up to standards was when I regretted commenting. Rage as proof of faith. I realised there was no floor under that sentence. If anger (an emotion that the Prophet Muhammad PBUH recommended to avoid) is the measurement, there's no version of devotion that doesn't eventually demand more anger. You don't get to rest in this kind of belief. You just get angrier at smaller things forever and call it iman (faith).
The hijabi fitness creator in question, Najah.Strength/Najah Hatahet? She's incredible, by the way. God bless her.
The thing that really got to me was her being a woman tearing down another woman, but when I went deeper, that strictness, that suffocating judgment, that piercing eye, it's not healthy. It's micromanagement of morality from the lowest form of consciousness: fear, anger, shame, pride, envy, and an unmet subconscious desire with a story of its own.
Freud's superego and the Ummah's body
This can count for any community, but I'm going to continue looking at the Muslim Ummah. If we look at it as one body, we can also view it from the perspective of the structure of personality: the id, ego, and superego.
The id is the most primal one, pure want, pure instinct, the part of you that desires before it's been taught shame or restraint or manners. It doesn't negotiate. It doesn't wait. It just wants.
The superego is the opposite end. It's the internalised parent, the internalised culture, the internalised crowd, every rule you absorbed so early you mistook it for your own conscience. It's the voice that tells you what's allowed and what should make you feel ashamed of wanting it at all. When it's healthy, it's useful. It's the thing that stops you from acting on every impulse you have. When it's not healthy, it becomes a warden with no off switch.
And the ego sits in between, doing the hardest job of the three. It's not there to win the argument for either side. Its whole purpose is to mediate, to find a livable answer between what you want and what you've been taught you're allowed to want. A strong ego doesn't eliminate desire, nor does it fully obey the inner critic. It holds both, and it negotiates, every single day, in a thousand small decisions you don't even notice you're making.
When you have a hyperactive superego, you are suppressing your Id instead of working with it to come up with a healthier solution and healthy boundaries for yourself and others. It's why content creators like Ayahs.Voice, Love.mongerer, Jamila Fair, and so many others are seen as so reactionary when they've just had enough and are using their platforms to speak up.
Fostering a healthy ego
So what does it actually look like to have an ego strong enough to do its job, instead of letting the superego run the whole show unsupervised?
It starts with energetic boundaries, not just digital ones. A block button protects your feed. It doesn't protect your nervous system, which is why you can (myself included) fall prey to commenting once in a while. You need to be able to feel someone's rage, recognise it as theirs, and not absorb it as a verdict on your own standing with God. That's a boundary that lives in your body, not just your settings menu.
It means surrounding yourself with people whose egos are doing their job too. Find your community, even a small one, where disagreement doesn't require destruction. Where someone can challenge you, and you can challenge them back, and you both walk away still recognising each other as part of the same body. That's support with texture, not an echo chamber that just agrees with you, but a room with enough psychological safety in it that no one needs to perform certainty to belong.
It means staying non-reactive, and I want to be honest about how hard that actually is. Non-reactive doesn't mean numb. It means you see the bait, you feel the pull to respond, and you choose not to hand your nervous system over to a stranger's superego for the next hour. You let the comment exist without needing to win it.
It means ignoring them from your whole reality, not just your timeline. Muting an account while still thinking about what they said for the rest of the day isn't disengagement. Real disengagement is deciding they don't get to live in your head rent-free either.
Here's the part most people skip entirely, though, and it's the part that actually changes anything long term. You have to get to know your own id instead of burying it.
Most of us were never taught to sit with our own wanting. We were taught to be ashamed of it the moment it appeared. And an id you've never met doesn't go away. It goes underground, and your superego, sensing something dangerous it can't name, starts treating your own desire like an intruder. That's when the superego stops being a guide and becomes a warden, not just towards you, but eventually towards everyone who reminds you of the want you were never allowed to have.
When you actually know your own id, what you want, what you're drawn to, what you're ashamed of wanting, your ego finally has something real to negotiate with. Not a stranger, it's suppressing. A part of itself is in a relationship with. I've seen it in myself. I'm no longer afraid of my dark side because I've seen it so much in my own hypnotherapy sessions and later on my trainings. I've seen it in my clients after we visit, release and alchemise.
That unsettled energy in the pit of their stomach finally frees. Or that relief after a round of EFT tapping when we tap on something that may seem 'dark' and 'shameful', but we hold space while we tap to let it go. That's the id feeling heard, the superego not fearing it and the ego cracking its fingers and saying 'yeah, now let's actually negotiate'. It's freeing, it's beautiful, and it helps you deepen your connection to God because, as Imam Ghazali says, to know yourself is to know Allah.
For those policing, judging and speaking with a sharp tongue and irrational words, this is where their anger and extremism stop. Not because they've become less devout, but because their devotion is finally coming from a whole self instead of a war between two halves of you that have never been introduced.
That's the mind, body and spirit functioning the way it was actually meant to.
As within, so without. You make peace with your own id, calm your superego and view yourself from the space of a healthy ego and a magical spiritual dynasty that gives you deep and direct contact with Creator Consciousness (Allah), you will invite less of this energy in your life. If enough of us do this inner work, we'll actually start to see a change in society around us. Until then, set your energetic boundaries and make them unbreakable.
Peaceee xox