Muslims who observe the holy month of Ramadan—which began this year at sundown on Feb. 28 and will conclude on March 29—abstain from food and drink, including water, from sunrise to sunset. Many also take on additional devotional practices: more frequent prayers, religious reading, and mosque attendance. A collection of the Prophet Muhammad’s hadiths (sayings) compiled a couple of centuries after his death repeatedly forbids intoxicants, meaning anything that prevents the mind’s good working order and focused prayer.
At one time in his life, Greg Kovalec, 71, had an idiosyncratic interpretation of this prohibition. “I was careful not to pick up my crack pipe during Ramadan until after sunset,” said Kovalec, who is now in recovery. “If you’re Muslim, and you still think of yourself as Muslim, and it’s Ramadan, and you’re still using, this is cognitive dissonance on steroids.” But he said that for some Muslims, ridding themselves of distractions during the day for Ramadan is what causes them to realize they need to change.
America’s approximately 4.5 million Muslims have a lower risk factor for alcoholism compared to the rest of the population, but the same risk prevalence for other substances. Research backs spirituality as an effective addiction intervention, but American Muslims and their leaders can have divergent views on acknowledging and treating members of their communities who struggle with addiction. Modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous, which famously requires members to recognize a higher power, Millati Islami began in 1989 as a 12-step program for Muslims; Kovalec is a board member. Today, Millati Islami is part of an effort to reduce stigma around addiction and addiction treatment within American Islam. The group’s mission is to return Muslims to taqwa: God-consciousness.
As Muslim addiction clinicians highlighted in a 2022 substance-abuse webinar, the Quran placed gambling in the same category as intoxicating substances when the Prophet Muhammad forbade the faithful from partaking of either because of their negative consequences. So, like the Quran, Millati Islami does not distinguish between behavioral and substance addiction. The organization’s website shows dozens of online and in-person meetings around the country. Due to the discreet nature of the meetings, exact membership data is unavailable, but the Millati Islami board members with whom I spoke reported growth in the number of chapters in recent years.
A 2020 poll of American Muslims by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding revealed that 37% of Muslim adults said that they knew someone in their faith community who struggled with addiction. While this percentage was significantly lower than it was among the general public (57%) and even other faith groups (all at 52% or higher), the majority of Muslims polled—76%—believed their faith community should do more to support members with addiction. They were more likely than the other religious groups surveyed to favor a “tough” approach, but there was variance within different groups: Black Muslims were less likely to advocate for a tough response to addiction than white Muslims (14% versus 27%), and Arab and Asian Muslims’ response fell in between.
Kovalec said he has different experiences with immigrant and Black American Muslim communities, the two with which he has the most frequent interaction. The immigrants with whom Kovalec comes in contact are primarily from Pakistan, he said: lawyers, doctors, and engineers who send their kids to American schools and colleges where they encounter drugs and alcohol. “We’ve got to convince Mom and Dad that yes, the problem does happen to us,” he said.
“You have some people who don’t want Muslims to recover in their masjid,” or mosque, said Millati Islami’s Executive Secretary Khaleelah Lynel Onque. She told me about an acquaintance who had approached five imams about hosting Millati Islami meetings at mosques, and only one had agreed. There are, she said, imams who “don’t believe in the disease of addiction,” who believe that religious observance alone is adequate to recover.
All the same, Onque said, “our numbers are growing tremendously.”
And Millati Islami is just one of several Muslim organizations established to assist with behavioral and substance addiction. Maristan, host of the 2022 webinar, is a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about mental health and decreasing stigma around seeking help in Muslim communities. The group’s name comes from an Islamic wellness tradition of hospitals called maristans, a name derived from a Persian word meaning “house of the sick.” But they were more than that: A 14th-century Grenada maristan was also a teaching hospital and proto-sanitarium.
Other U.S. Muslim addiction initiatives include Madina House, addiction clinics offering a separate Muslim recovery track in partnership with the Muslim Community Center East Bay in Pleasanton, California. Stanford University has a Muslim Mental Health and Islamic Psychology Lab that, in 2020, issued a series of videos on historic Muslim understandings of mental health, and the intersection of Islam and contemporary psychology.
AA encourages members to pursue recovery one day at a time, advice that is also familiar to those mourning the loss of a loved one. Onque converted to Islam 13 years ago after her son died by suicide. She said she found consolation in the Muslim practice of salah, praying five times a day throughout the day. “When I think about 24 hours, that’s a long time,” Onque said. The regular prayer times are an opportunity “to get up on your feet” if you’ve fallen that day: “From salah to salah, I think, ‘I’ve got one more shot, I’ve got one more shot to get it right.’”
Kovalec said Millati Islami usually sees “a little spike of people” coming to meetings during Ramadan. Onque said that Ramadan’s invitation to extra devotional practices is another opportunity for renewal. “It’s a month of reflection,” she said. Nightly mosque attendance and breaking fasts together offer a new routine and a fresh start.
“When you practice the religion and you go to the meetings regularly and you have your routine,” Onque said, “then you’ve got a chance.” Reading the Quran and praying can shift believers’ orientation from seeking their own individual pleasures, she said, to seeking “the pleasure of Allah.”
Onque said her work with other Millati Islami members is primarily with women, for whom Millati Islami offers separate meetings. She said that women tend to be caregivers for children or parents, and so part of the aim of the women’s meetings is to let women know that they need to take care of themselves so they can “reap the goodness and the bounties that Allah is bestowing on us.”
As in the general meetings, Onque said that it is crucial to let the women know that they don’t need to struggle privately. “They’ll be like, ‘OK, sister, I don’t want anybody to know that I’m doing this and I’m doing that,’” she said. “We let other women know that they’re not alone.”
“Relating your inventory, your deeds, and your distrusts and your fears,” said Kovalec. “When you tell them to another person and to God, you are taking their power away from you.”
Kovalec noted a difference between the fifth step in Alcoholics Anonymous and in Millati Islami. Where Alcoholics Anonymous requires members “to admit to God, to oneself, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs,” Millati Islami requires members to confess only “to Allah and to ourselves.” According to Kovalec’s preferred interpretation, the plural “ourselves” means everyone at Millati Islami. “You’re not spilling these beans to anybody, you’re talking to another Muslim,” he said. This is an important distinction for Kovalec, who said he realized he needed a specifically Muslim 12-step program because of a Quran verse he read while in prison, where he converted to Islam. The verse cautions Muslims against taking either Jews or Christians as a wali—a word that can be translated as “guardian” or “mentor”—saying that they are each other’s guardians and mentors. Kovalec interpreted this to mean that he needed a Muslim sponsor to recover within an Islamic context.
“We have the Islamic approach of addiction and recovery,” said Onque. She wants imams to hold Millati Islami meetings at their mosques. “I just feel like if it’s in the masjid, if people come in on Jum’ah [Friday prayer], or they come in to make prayer time—if they could just see that, then there’s hope.”
This story is part of a series Tablet is publishing to promote religious literacy across different religious communities, supported by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
