Nafs Center is honored to announce a special five-lecture series with Dr. Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre, focused on mental wellness issues impacting our community through the lens of Islamic spiritual well-being and Islamic Psychology.
This series is part of Nafs Center’s mission to promote mental wellness by connecting our community with meaningful education, trusted scholarship, and spiritually grounded guidance. Through these lectures, Dr. Francesca will help explore important questions related to emotional struggles, spiritual growth, family and community challenges, and the role of Islamic Psychology in understanding the human being.
Lecture 1: The Map Was Always There: An Introduction to Islamic Psychology: Sat 13 June 2026, 7pm MAPS Main Hall
Most Muslims have heard the words qalb, nafs, and rūḥ their whole lives without ever being told that these are clinical concepts — the foundation of a complete psychological tradition developed by scholars over thirteen centuries. This opening class reintroduces ʿilm al-nafs and suluk not as a spiritual luxury or a self-help trend, but as a sovereign science of the human soul that predates Western psychology by a millennium. Participants leave with a new vocabulary for their inner life and a fundamentally different understanding of what mental health means from within the tradition.
Lecture 2: Arrogance (Kibr) and Imposter Syndrome: Sat 25 July 2026, 7pm MAPS Main Hall
Western psychology’s framework for low self-esteem and imposter syndrome – the chronic sense that one is a fraud, that success is undeserved, that exposure is imminent -seems solid at first. But getting deeper, we realise that low self-esteem has more in common with arrogance than we might suspect, it is actually the same root disease in disguise. The Islamic tradition is unambiguous on this point — kibr does not only point upward in obvious self-inflation; it operates just as destructively when the ego fixates on its own inadequacy, monitoring, comparing, and privately insisting on a status it believes it deserves but fears it will never achieve. This class unpacks both the obvious and the hidden faces of kibr using al-Ghazālī’s clinical taxonomy, examines why contemporary self-help culture — with its emphasis on confidence-building and self-affirmation — often deepens the disease it claims to treat, and introduces tawāḍuʿ not as low self-esteem by another name, but as the entirely different inner architecture the tradition prescribes: a heart that has stopped keeping score altogether.
Lecture 3: My Husband Is Not My Therapist: The Psychology of Muslim Marriages: Sat 12 Sep 2026 7pm MAPS Main Hall
Muslim couples are expected to fulfill each other’s needs that no two human beings can ever fully meet — and then are blamed individually when the marriage breaks down. This class examines the Islamic understanding of marriage not as a romantic contract between two needs but as a covenant (mīthāq) between two souls, each of which arrives with their own history of heart diseases. We look at the most common patterns of marital breakdown through a classical lens — how kibr operates in conflict, how ḥasad poisons admiration, how fear of vulnerability masquerades as emotional unavailability — and offer a reframe of what it means to do the work of a marriage from within the tradition.
Lecture 4: The Screen and the Soul: Pornography Addiction Through an Islamic Lens: Sat 17 Oct 2026, 7pm MAPS Main Hall
No topic is more urgently needed and more consistently avoided in Muslim community spaces. This class addresses pornography addiction without shame and without flinching — because the silence around it is costing us marriages, destroying young men’s capacity for intimacy, and leaving families without any framework for understanding what is happening to them. Drawing on Ibn al-Qayyim’s clinical analysis of how compulsive desire progressively enslaves the nafs, and integrating contemporary neuroscience on addiction and reward circuitry, we examine what this addiction actually is, why willpower alone never works, and what a genuine Islamic treatment protocol looks like.
Lecture 5: The Entitled Child and the Exhausted Parent: Narcissism in Family Systems: Sat 14 Nov 2026, 7pm MAPS Main Hall
Having established kibr as a clinical reality of the heart, this class turns to one of its most consequential arenas of operation: the family system. The home is where kibr is first cultivated, modelled, and transmitted across generations. We examine how well-intentioned parenting choices systematically train the nafs toward entitlement rather than tawāḍuʿ, and how controlling or shaming family environments produce the opposite but equally disabling profile — outward compliance concealing a wounded and rageful inner life. The tradition’s framework is clear: character is formed in relationship, and it can be deformed in relationship. This class asks what it looks like to take that responsibility seriously, both as a parent and as an adult child examining what was handed to them.