Scaffolding, Not Salvation
On formation without villages: what we ask from structure, and what it cannot give.
In the previous two posts, “It’s not my money” and “Proximity ≠ Piety,” we kept returning to the same quiet discomfort: the heart’s tendency to attach meaning where it isn’t guaranteed. In the last reflection, we tried to loosen a ladder that forms quietly in spiritual spaces—the instinct to treat proximity as proof. This piece stays with what that undoing reveals: our hunger for structure, our fear of being misled, and the way something meant to support us can start to feel like the destination instead of the path—something we ask to save us rather than something that helps us walk.
Saudi Arabia, 2007
Before I left for Saudi Arabia to study in 2007, my paternal grandmother looked at me and said, “Don’t go over there and become a terrorist.”
I can still hear the half-joking firmness in it. She was not trying to perform a political diagnosis. She was a grandmother watching her grandson step into a world she did not understand, during years when fear had its own atmosphere, when suspicion clung to ordinary conversations even inside families.
I tried to answer her honestly, but also without humiliating her for being afraid. I told her, “That’s actually why I’m going to study, Gramma. I want to understand Islam for myself and not be beholden to someone else’s interpretation.” Although I admittedly did not have a deep passion for studying Islam—it was something my mother (Allah bless her) raised me to know I would do—I did care about the Deen (way of life). Furthermore, I wanted to broaden my understanding enough to carry back into the lives we were actually living.
Those words sounded noble even to me. They were noble, in their own way. Still, if I sit with it long enough, I can admit something tender and unsettling underneath: I was not only seeking knowledge. I was trying to be safe—from being misled, and from misleading myself.
In those early years, my religious community had its own refrain: a paranoia over heterodoxy (both theological and jurisprudential), juxtaposed with a belief that religious scholars did not exist in America.
That combination does something to us. It turns seeking into bracing. Religion begins to feel like a room we enter with our shoulders tight, listening for the hidden agenda, checking every sentence for risk. Guidance stops feeling like nourishment and starts feeling like defense, and we learn to treat certainty like the only ethically responsible posture.
It also relocates legitimacy. If there are “no scholars here,” and danger is everywhere, then the safest Islam must live somewhere else—not only geographically, but psychologically. “There” becomes cleaner. “There” becomes untainted by the compromises of our lives. We do not only want to learn; we want the feeling of being protected from error.
For many Black Americans, that fear is not abstract. We carry a long memory of being fed narratives as if they were salvation—propaganda dressed as moral concern, ideology sold as truth, theology used to manage people rather than free them. So when we finally reach for Islam, many of us reach for it with a particular hunger: not just for spirituality, but for Truth—with a capital T—something that cannot be bent by someone else’s agenda.
There is dignity in that hunger. There is also danger in it, because hunger makes us impatient with nuance. It can make us mistake what is loud for what is real. It can make us treat the nearest strong voice as if it is the same thing as clarity, and clarity as if it is the same thing as safety.
If we sit with that long enough, a quieter question begins to form under the whole story—not only in the story of leaving, but in the story of how we were formed. What kind of religious life gets built when fear becomes the organizing principle? What happens to the heart when the main project is “don’t get tricked,” rather than “become sincere”?
A Cautious Inheritance
When religion is carried primarily as defense, it shapes what we emphasize. Many of us did not lack devotion; we lacked spaciousness. The air was full of boundaries, warnings, corrective instincts. Outward practice was emphasized because it could be measured. Correct belief was emphasized because it could be defended. The inner life—tazkiya (purification), the slow education of the ego, the hidden diseases of the heart—was present, but often as vocabulary more than as a sustained discipline.
This is not an indictment. It is an observation about what fear tends to produce. Fear makes us reach for what is controllable. Fear makes us cling to what can be proven. And checklists can soothe the nervous system, even when they cannot tell us what we most need to know: whether we have become softer, more careful with people’s dignity, less impressed with ourselves, more willing to repent without being seen.
That is why some of us became fluent in critique. We learned to spot drift and excess, and there is real benefit in that. But critique by itself does not purify a heart. It sharpens suspicion, and suspicion can become its own comfort. It can feel like righteousness while protecting the ego from more exposing work: humility that is not noticed, gentleness that is not celebrated, sincerity that is not legible to anyone except Allah.
Tasawwuf (the ascetic-mystical stream in Islam)1 entered many of our lives under that shadow. We were not primarily taught to see it as the interior pursuit of Ihsan (spiritual excellence). We were taught to see it as a slippery slope—something that can lead away from Truth and into emotional opinions and feelings, a religious tone where sweetness could begin to substitute for soundness. The fear was not that people would become “soft.” The fear was that softness could become a method for excusing drift.
Underneath that suspicion was a legitimate concern. Spiritual experience can be intoxicating. Communities can normalize claims and practices that do not belong to the religion simply because they are wrapped in beautiful language. Many of us had seen religious sentimentality. We did not want to live that way ourselves, and we did not want to pass along something unsound by dressing it up as spirituality.
But because we did not always have a robust interior program for tazkiya, our opposition to sentimentality sometimes hardened into opposition to interiority itself. Fear became method. Method became identity. And over time, another layer revealed itself: some of our suspicion was not only about protecting Islam. It was also about protecting our orientation. If religion could remain divided into clean categories—Truth over here, deviation over there—then we could avoid facing how complicated our own souls are. Knowledge does not automatically heal the ego, and correct beliefs do not automatically produce a purified heart; admitting that is harder than denouncing someone else’s mistake.
The uncomfortable mercy in this is that it takes away our easiest escape hatch. It becomes harder to blame “the other camp” when we start to notice the heart’s more universal instinct: trying to secure itself—sometimes through zeal, sometimes through belonging, sometimes through the reputation of being careful.
IbnTaymiyya and Kitab al-Tasawwuf
This is where encountering IbnTaymiyya’s Kitab al-Tasawwuf (The Book of Tasawwuf) began to rearrange things in me.
Many of us encounter IbnTaymiyya (d. 728/1328) as a symbol before we encounter him as a thinker. We inherit him as a paragon of religious scholarship. Often referred to as “Shaykh Al-Islam” (an honorific title for outstanding scholars of the Islamic sciences in the classical era),2 his name can close debates, serving as a shorthand for unbiased objectivity. In that inheritance, he can feel like pure firmness. What surprised me, when I actually sat with his discussions—particularly around spiritual people, the Sufis and the Fuqara (spiritually impoverished)—was how carefully he separates boundaries from contempt.3
He does hold lines. He does not blur theological claims to be “inclusive.” He does not treat spirituality as an excuse to loosen jurisprudence. The fear of extravagance that ran through his Hanbali instincts—the fear that religion could become ornate in a way that drifts—does show up in him. But it shows up with discernment, not with blanket dismissal. He critiques what deserves critique without turning critique into a personality.
What I did not expect was how specific he becomes about the Sufis themselves. He does not write as though “the Sufis” are a single moral unit. He describes three broad categories: those of realities (Sufiyyat al-Haqa’iq), those of provisions (Sufiyyat al-Arzaq), and those of form (Sufiyyat al-Rasm).4 The point is not to flatten people into boxes; it is to refuse the shortcut our egos love, where a label becomes a verdict and a style becomes a guarantee.
Sitting with that distinction can be disorienting in a good way. It means we cannot dismiss an entire tradition because we fear its abuses, nor can we romanticize a spiritual community just because it feels warm. It also means we cannot rely on appearances. Form can be learned quickly. Transformation cannot. People can carry the vocabulary of refinement while remaining untouched by the work of refinement, and others can look ordinary while quietly wrestling toward sincerity.
If we allow that honesty to settle, the argument starts dissolving into a better question. It stops being “tasawwuf: yes or no?” and becomes: what is the direction of our hearts, and what are we doing with the structures that claim to help us?
This is where the tradition’s language begins to feel less like jargon and more like relief: the difference between the path and the structure.
Tariq and Tariqah in a Fragmented Modernity
Before we name anything specifically, it helps to say this plainly: what follows is not an argument about Sufi Turuq (plural of Tariqah) in particular. It is about something we see in organized religious life in general. Wherever people gather around the sacred—where devotion becomes community, and community becomes structure—the same temptation appears: the means meant to help us walk can quietly start to feel like the destination.
That is part of why the tradition’s language around Tariq and Tariqah feels relieving. It lets us separate the journey from the container without pretending the container is meaningless.
Tariq is the path itself—the movement of the soul toward Allah through prayer, repentance, restraint, honesty, and the slow education of desire. It is not a badge. It is not a room. It is the work that remains even when no one is watching and nothing about our religiosity is impressive.
Tariqah is an order, a structure that formed historically around that path. For those who stand inside these lineages, baraka (blessing) in the silsila (chain of transmission) is not merely sentimental language; it is part of why the structure matters. Alongside that metaphysical reality, there is also a practical function that should not be secularized or dismissed: rhythm, companionship, accountability—ordinary supports that can keep a seeker steady enough to keep walking.
The problem is not the existence of a Tariqah. The problem is when we ask it to do what it was never meant to do.
A structure can help us walk; it cannot walk for us. An affiliation can offer support; it cannot guarantee sincerity. A lineage can carry blessing; it cannot substitute for purification.
And here is where our era forces an added honesty. We do not only live with a different set of ideas than earlier generations; we live with a different set of conditions. People move. Families are scattered. Time is broken into pieces that rarely feel like enough. Most of us are carrying modern burdens that do not pause simply because we found a community we love. Even the most sincere structure cannot reproduce the old village continuity, because the material conditions that made that continuity possible no longer exist for most of us.
When the ecosystem changes, expectations have to change—not out of trying something new, but out of refusing to pretend. Older religious ecosystems rarely asked one relationship to carry everything. Even when one teacher was central, seekers were surrounded by layers—jurists, theologians, mentors, elders, companions—people close enough to see a life, not just a question. What held people wasn’t a single voice. It was a web.
Now, we often try to compress what used to be an ecosystem into a single relationship—either because we romanticize what earlier communities had, or because we do not fully understand how layered that guidance actually was. We want one teacher to carry theology and trauma, law and marriage, spiritual aspiration and family conflict. We may not say it out loud, but we feel it when the teacher sets a boundary, when the answer is brief, when the response is, “This is not my domain.” It is easy to interpret that limit as indifference, or failure, or rejection. It is healthier to call it what it usually is: the weight of our lives meeting the limits of a single human role.
That is why something like a mentor matrix can be less of a modern invention and more of an attempt to rebuild—on a smaller scale—what older communities provided organically: a teacher for knowledge and grounding, an elder for perspective, a trusted friend for companionship and accountability, and, when needed, therapeutic support for patterns we cannot see clearly on our own.² The point is not to collect names. It is to distribute weight.
But we also have to be honest about how we build that matrix. If the entire structure of our support is “overseas,” literally or figuratively (i.e., far away), then we have not rebuilt an ecosystem—we have rebuilt the old reflex: legitimacy lives elsewhere, and what is near us is not trustworthy enough to hold the sacred parts of our lives. Sometimes a distant scholar is a mercy. Sometimes distance protects clarity. But distance also limits counsel, because distance limits what a person can truly see.
A support structure meant for tarbiya (spiritual formation) usually requires at least some people who have context for our lives—people who can see patterns, who understand our environment, who can notice when our “questions” are really evasions. Not because local equals holy, but because guidance becomes thin when it has no lived picture to work with.
And for the parts of our counsel that are not local—because sometimes we do consult scholars at a distance—we benefit from knowing what we are consulting them on. Distance changes what is responsible to ask. In Usul al-Fiqh (legal theory), there is a principle that keeps us honest: al-hukm ‘ala al-shay’ far’un ‘an tasawwuruh (a judgment about a thing follows from properly conceiving it). If the person we are asking cannot truly conceive our situation—its constraints, relationships, unseen costs—then what they offer may still clarify principles, boundaries, and direction. But it may not be able to hold the full texture of a life.
Once we accept that, the structure regains its proper scale. We stop demanding that one far voice solve what only proximity can understand. We stop treating remoteness as a stamp of purity. We begin building a web of counsel that can hold modern burdens without forcing any single relationship to pretend it is an ecosystem.
And when our expectations shift like that, something else shifts with them: the spiritual path stops being confused with the container. The order becomes a means again —something that can be for us or against us depending on what we do with it. Association, by itself, does not grant merit. It can support our sincerity, or it can become a hiding place from sincerity. The same structure that steadies one person can flatter another’s ego. The difference is not the label. The difference is what we seek inside it.
Scaffolding, Not Salvation
Once we admit that association is not merit, one of the heart’s favorite shortcuts collapses. Belonging can no longer stand in for evidence. It leaves us with what we were quietly hoping structure would spare us from: uncertainty, ordinary weakness, the slow work of becoming someone Allah is pleased with when no one is watching.
That is why the language matters here—not as decoration, but as a boundary for the soul. Structure is scaffolding. It can steady us while something real is being built. But it cannot be the building, and it cannot be salvation. If we treat it like proof, we will either demand what it cannot give or resent it for being human. If we receive it as support, it regains its proper scale—meaningful, even blessed, but still a means.
And because it is a means, it can be for us or against us depending on what we do with it. The same nearness that helps one person become more sincere can become another person’s hiding place. A person can stand close to the sacred and still be asleep inside. Another can live far from the center of religious life and be quietly beloved to Allah. The question is not where we stand, but what is happening in us as we stand there.
A dua (supplication) of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ has become a quiet reorientation when we feel ourselves turning worldly measures into spiritual proof: “O Allah, do not make the dunya our greatest concern, nor the limit of our knowledge.”5 It does not ask us to despise the world. It asks Allah to keep the world from becoming our ceiling—and that plea reaches into spiritual life too. If the comfort of being “inside,” the security of having access, or the pride of affiliation becomes our greatest concern, we will eventually bend the path to protect the feeling the structure gives us.
So the work remains less dramatic than we wish. It is the work of keeping means as means: receiving structure with gratitude, accepting limitations without resentment, letting baraka be real without turning it into a certificate, letting companionship support us without turning it into a scoreboard. The path stays what it has always been—prayer, repentance, inner honesty—especially when nobody is watching.
And then, sometimes, Allah lets us see what community can do when it is healthy: not saving us by association, but supporting growth in ways that ripple beyond the rooms we thought were most important.
I think about my grandmother again—not as a symbol, but as a person. That first moment in 2007 carried the era’s fear and misunderstanding into our living room. Years later, she told me about something that happened at her church. Someone began speaking about Muslims in anti-Muslim, inflammatory ways—confident and careless, the way people can be when they’ve never had to look into the eyes of the people they’re talking about. My grandmother defended Islam and Muslims quietly but firmly. It wasn’t a debate performance. It was simply a refusal to let slander pass through her presence uncontested.
Someone asked her where she learned what she was saying. She told me she answered without hesitation: “My grandchildren are Muslim, and they taught me what Islam is about.”
Ultimately, with Allah is success.
Alexander Knysh, Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 1.
J. H. Kramers, rev. R. W. Bulliet and R. C. Repp, “Shaykh al-Islām,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 9, San–Sze, ed. C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, and G. Lecomte (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 399–402.
Ahmad ibn Abd al-Halim Ibn Taymiyya, “Risala fi al-Sufiyya wa-al-Fuqara’,” in Majmu’ Fatawa Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyya, vol. 11, Kitab al-Tasawwuf, accessed February 1, 2026, https://www.islamweb.net/ar/library/content/22/1093/.
Ibid.