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Cheesecake factory.  It is a restaurant known for its cheesecakes, obviously.  The restaurant also serves appetizers and main courses and they are quite tasty. Let us commence our forth strategy with a thought experiment about the Cheesecake Factory.  Assume you are working for a reputable financial services company and the busy fiscal quarter has just concluded.  To celebrate the completion of what was a grueling fiscal quarter, your co-workers decide to go out to dinner at, you guessed it, Cheesecake Factory.   As the day of the dinner arrives, you ponder deeply about what cheesecake you will be ordering.  The various options run through your mind until you settle on what you believe to be the most scrumptious, delicious, flavorful cheesecake. Your 13 co-workers and yourself go to the Cheesecake Factory and enjoy an appetizing, hardy dinner and then that moment that you have been waiting for arrives.  The waiter approaches your table and says, “Can I interest anyone in some dessert?” Some of your co-workers respond. “I’m really stuffed.  I think I will pass.” says one of your co-workers.  Another follows, “Yea, I don’t have any room for dessert.” Slowly but surely, all 13 of your co-workers turn down dessert until the waiter finally approaches you.  At this point you have to ask yourself whether you will be the one person to cut through the social pressure and say, “Yes, I will have this 2500 calorie cheesecake because I’m a glutton and proud of it!”  It is more likely than not that you would capitulate and end up passing on the cheesecake.   Such is the reality of how one’s environment can affect them.

Your environment has a tremendous impact on your psycho-spiritual being and when it comes to dealing with destructive doubts, it can be the difference between succumbing to those doubts or navigating away from them.  This is so because your environment, especially your social environment, deeply impacts you in two ways.

First, your social environment shapes your spiritual heart. As was mentioned earlier, the locus of attack for doubts is the heart.  A diseased and weak heart is an easy prey for parasitic doubts.  Diseases of the heart include such items as kibr (arrogance), ‘ujub (self aggrandizement) , riya’ (ostentation), ḥasad (blameworth jealousy), etc. These diseases impede the truth and facilitate shubuhāt in the heart. One of the main cures to these spiritual diseases is ṣuḥbah al-ṣāliḥīn (companionship of the righteous). Thus, one’s social environment has a direct impact on the spiritual well being of the heart. We will expound upon this more when we revisit the heart in our ninth strategy, ‘Focus on the Heart’.

The second way your environment impacts you is that it shapes you and your sense of belonging.  Numerous studies in social psychology have examined the phenomenon of social conformity. (Think back to the Cheesecake Factory thought experiment).  These studies bifurcate conformity into two categories: informational conformity and normative conformity.

Informational conformity is related to the desire to feel certain and usually occurs when a person lacks knowledge and looks to the dominant group for guidance.  Under informational conformity a person internalizes the views of the dominant group and adopts them as an individual.  This type of conformity is especially potent when a person is also part of a subgroup. For example, a marginally practicing Muslim might be surrounded by secular humanists or postmodernists at their college or university who make up the majority of the people that this person interacts with.  This would constitute the dominant group while the other Muslims (perhaps at home or in the masjid) would be part of the subgroup.  In such an environment, if this person lacks knowledge or is uncertain about the veracity of Islam, they could easily find themselve internalizing the worldview of the dominante group.

Normative conformity on the other hand, relates to the desire to belong and is manifest when a person finds themselves yielding to group pressure because they want to fit in with the dominant group.  This type of conformity is generally limited to compliance, where a person publicly accepts the views of the dominant group but privately rejects them. However, such a state of cognitive dissonance between the worldview of the dominant group and the worldview of the subgroup needs to be settled and over the long term, the ideas of the subgroup can become dormant or no longer expressed in any form or fashion.¹  Thus, certainty and a sense of belonging need to be sought from the Muslim community.

Setting aside studies in social psychology, most people have an intuitive understanding of social conformity.  If your son or daughter wants to play with a group of friends and you are fully aware that this group consists of individuals who like to smoke and drink and are extremely rude, you intuitively incline towards dissuading your child from befriending them.  On the other hand, if you are familiar with a group of friends who are courteous in their mannerisms, serious about their school work and have a healthy home environment, you would encourage your child to be a part of this group.

Islamic source texts constantly bolster this intuitive understanding of social conformity in a number of ways.  For example, many verses in the Qur’an mention the eschatological consequences of a negative, unhealthy social environment:

“And ˹beware of˺ the Day the wrongdoer will bite his nails ˹in regret˺ and say, “Oh! I wish I had followed the Way along with the Messenger! Woe to me! I wish I had never taken so-and-so as a close friend.”²