Islam and the Contemporary World

Islam and the Contemporary World

Trauma and Collective Anxiety in Post-War Society: Capacities of Islamic Mysticism for Psycho-Social Healing

Document Type : Original Research Article

Author
Assistant Professor, Department of Islamic Philosophy and Mysticism, Faculty of Religions and Islamic Teachings, University of Islamic Denominations, Tehran, Iran.
10.22034/icwj.2026.599300.1078
Abstract
This article examines the psycho-social capacities of Islamic mysticism (ʿirfān) for addressing collective trauma and anxiety in the aftermath of the 2026 war between the United States, Israel, and Iran. Drawing on sociological theories of collective and cultural trauma, the psychology of religious coping, and the empirical literature on Islamic spiritual interventions, the article argues that classical Sufi concepts — ṣabr (patience), tawakkul (trust in God), dhikr (remembrance), and tazkiyat al-nafs (purification of the self) — offer culturally resonant frameworks for meaning-making, affect regulation, and communal reconstruction that complement, rather than replace, professional mental health care. Rather than treating the war as a field-research site, the article uses the Iranian case as an illustrative context for testing an integrative theoretical model; its method is conceptual and interpretive, not statistical. Two questions organize the analysis: which specific mystical constructs correspond, at a functional level, to the mechanisms trauma research identifies as protective, and how can these constructs be responsibly integrated — at the individual, communal, and institutional levels — into a Twelver Shiʿi Iranian setting without reproducing negative religious coping or displacing clinical care. The article grounds its answer in the concrete institutional life of Iranian Shiʿism — the mosque, the shrine (ziyārat), the religious assembly (hayʾat), and the communal mourning rituals of Muharram — rather than in the ṭarīqah structures more familiar to Sufism's international reception, and it argues that the mystical tradition's existential registers, not only its cognitive-behavioral analogues, are what give it distinctive therapeutic purchase.
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Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 08 September 2026