The Journal of the Institute for Muslim Advancement and Renewal Vol. 1

Mental Health: Beyond Industry Barriers and Biases

Volume 1 | Mental Health Beyond Industry Barriers and Biases Description

The 2026 volume of The Journal of the Institute for Muslim Advancement and Renewal, titled Mental Health: Beyond Industry Barriers and Biases, explores mental health as more than an individual clinical concern. This volume examines the moral, spiritual, social, economic, and institutional conditions that shape how mental health is understood and treated. In recent years, mental health has become one of the dominant languages through which people describe pain, identity, relationships, trauma, and healing. This language has brought needed recognition to real suffering and has helped many seek care.

At the same time, the growing professionalization and industrialization of mental health raises critical questions such as what happens when ordinary forms of care are outsourced to institutions? What assumptions about the human being underlie modern therapeutic models? How do economics, social fragmentation, family breakdown, technology, secularism, and institutional bias shape our understanding of wellness? This volume brings together essays that examine these questions with seriousness, compassion, and intellectual honesty.

Harmony: The Making of a Good Life

by Mohamed A. Azeez

What does it mean to live the good life and why does it always feel just out of reach? In a world obsessed with image, achievement, and self-optimization, this book offers something radically different. Harmony reveals that the good life emerges from the sacred interplay between your relationships: with God, your inner self, your family, your work, your longings, and even with the things you fear most. Through relatable stories, divine wisdom, and piercing cultural critique, this book invites you to start realigning your life through some of your most important relationships. The good life isn’t something you earn, it is something you recognize and receive when you’re in Harmony with what truly matters.

The Light We Lost: Grappling With Shariah in the Modern World

by Mashal Ayobi

For most of my life, Shariah was a shadow that was politicized and weaponized. I was taught to see it as a problem to explain away and an ancient system out of step with modern values. Even within my own faith community, the word had been reduced to legal panic or ritual technicality. This book is the story of what happened when I stopped running from the word and started listening. It is about the slow undoing of assumptions, the reshaping of my intellectual and spiritual world, and the quiet awe of realizing that what I feared most might be what I needed all along. Shariah is not the enemy of modernity. It is a vision for human flourishing rooted in mercy, clarity, responsibility, and reverence. It weaves worship with justice, private ethics with public order, rights with obligations, and in a world that feels increasingly disjointed, this coherence is essential.

Hidden Secrets

by Mariyam Ali Azam

While walking home, Rayyan comes across an interesting rock. Her older sister, Ilham, thinks it could be a meteorite—a piece of a shooting star that fell to Earth. Rayyan wishes she could see a shooting star. To satisfy their curiosity, the inquisitive sisters convince their parents to take them on a stargazing adventure. Under the sparkling night sky, Ilham and Rayyan learn that shooting stars guard the secrets of Allah’s unseen realm, al ghayb. “But why does Allah keep secrets from us?” Rayyan wonders. The answer opens up a universe of possibilities.

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*Forthcoming October 2026: The Journal of the Institute for Muslim Advancement and Renewal Volume 1