Unconventional Duha Research Unitary

The concept of junūn (madness) occupies a central place in Islamic jurisprudence. For over a millennium, fuqahāʾ defined junūn as the covering or veiling of the ʿaql such that reason ceases to function. In this condition, a person ceases to be mukallaf — religiously accountable — for the Sharīʿah does not obligate one who cannot comprehend, intend, or act with rational agency. This framework, while elegant in its simplicity, was shaped in an era where insanity was observed in stark, visible forms: delirium, incoherent speech, or wandering the streets in a state of permanent confusion.

But the landscape of mental illness in the modern world presents new challenges. Today, millions of Muslims suffer from psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and psychosis — illnesses that do not always erase the ʿaql, but often cloud it, distort it, or leave it intermittently functional. The classical binary of ʿāqil (possessing reason) versus majnūn (bereft of reason) seems insufficient to capture these states. The complexity deepens with the widespread use of psychotropic medications. Antipsychotics and mood stabilisers — hailed as life-saving in modern psychiatry — often induce side effects such as drowsiness, hypersomnia, anhedonia, and emotional flattening. Patients report that these drugs “silence the noise in the brain,” but at the cost of suppressing the will to live, muting joy, and extinguishing motivation.

Here arises a profound dilemma for Islamic legal theory:

How should taklīf (religious obligation) be understood in those whose intellect is not destroyed, but chemically subdued?

What does it mean to command ṣalāh or ṣawm from a believer who spends most of his waking hours in medicated sleep, or who cannot summon the intention (niyyah) due to pharmacological anhedonia?

These are not isolated cases but a reality facing tens of millions of Muslims across the globe.

Yet, as our survey of fatāwā reveals, no general guideline has been articulated. The ruling remains case-by-case, relying on whether the patient appears rational in a given moment. While this reflects the cautious spirit of fiqh, it leaves families, physicians, and patients navigating in uncertainty. The absence of systematic guidance risks injustice: either overburdening the ill with obligations they cannot fulfill, or excusing them prematurely and cutting them off from spiritual lifelines.

This paper therefore proposes to re-examine junūn in light of contemporary psychiatric realities.

We argue that the binary of sane versus insane must be expanded to include a third category: psychological incapacity under pharmacological suppression. Within this category, taklīf is not absent but may require modification — lighter forms of worship, allowances for missed duties, or recognition of diminished capacity. Our aim is not to replace classical fiqh, but to revive its spirit: to bring the eternal principles of Sharīʿah into dialogue with the lived reality of today’s afflicted souls.

Classical Fiqh Categories of Junun

In classical Islamic jurisprudence, the question of taklīf — who is legally and morally accountable before Allah — always hinged upon the state of the ʿaql (intellect). The Prophet ﷺ said:

“The pen is lifted from three: the sleeper until he awakens, the child until he matures, and the insane (majnūn) until he regains his reason.”

(Narrated in Abu Dawūd, Tirmidhī, and others)

This ḥadīth became the foundation upon which jurists built their rulings concerning madness. Yet, jurists did not treat insanity as a single, monolithic state. Rather, they recognized variations and subtleties that resonate with what we might today call “degrees of mental illness.”

1. Junūn (Insanity)

Defined as the complete covering of the ʿaql such that rational thought ceases.

A majnūn cannot comprehend right from wrong, cannot form valid intention (niyyah), and cannot be held accountable for obligations or liabilities.

This state could be:

Junūn dāʾim (permanent) → person is treated as continuously exempt from taklīf.

Junūn ṭāriʾ (intermittent/episodic) → taklīf is suspended during periods of insanity, but obligations return in lucid intervals.

2. Al-Maʿtūh (The Feeble-Minded / Intellectually Impaired)

A category distinct from majnūn.

The maʿtūh is not entirely bereft of intellect, but suffers a weakness or deficiency: limited comprehension, poor judgment, difficulty managing affairs.

Jurists often likened this to the state of a perpetual child — legally accountable in limited ways.

Obligations are present but mitigated; contracts and testimony may be invalid, but daily worship remains according to ability.

3. Al-Malankhūliyā (Melancholia)

Borrowed from Greco-Arabic medicine, this category recognized those overcome by delusions, fears, or distorted imagination due to “black bile.”

Ibn Sīnā and al-Rāzī described conditions resembling modern psychosis: hearing voices, imagining threats, living in irrational fear.

Though discussed medically rather than legally, the overlap with fiqh was clear: if melancholia destroyed rational capacity, the person was treated as majnūn. If partial, obligations remained.

4. Ahwāl Mutaqallibah (Fluctuating States)

Jurists also acknowledged that some individuals oscillated between sanity and insanity.

During lucid moments, they were treated as fully accountable; during madness, exempt.

This principle resonates with conditions like epilepsy, delirium, or cyclical insanity.

5. Legal Consequences

Across madhāhib, the consequences of junūn were consistent:

ʿIbādāt (Worship): Obligations like prayer, fasting, and zakāt fall when intellect is absent.

Muʿāmalāt (Transactions): Contracts, marriage, and financial dealings are invalid if entered during madness.

ʿUqūbāt (Punishments): A majnūn is not liable for crimes committed without awareness.

Wilāyah (Guardianship): A guardian (walī) is appointed for the insane to manage affairs.

The fuqahāʾ recognized degrees of mental impairment:

Total loss of reason (majnūn) → full removal of taklīf.

Partial impairment (maʿtūh, melancholia) → modified obligations.

Fluctuating states → taklīf applies in lucid intervals only.

This framework shows that Islamic law is not binary, but subtle and adaptive. Yet, it was limited by the medical knowledge of its age.

The question now is: how do these categories map onto modern conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and psychosis — especially under the influence of psychiatric drugs?

Modern Psychiatry and the Reality of Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, and Psychosis

The rise of psychiatry in the modern era has transformed how societies classify, diagnose, and treat mental illness. Unlike the premodern Islamic jurists, who spoke in terms of junūn and ʿaql, psychiatry deploys a vast taxonomy of disorders codified in diagnostic manuals such as the DSM-5 and ICD-11. Within this framework, conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and psychosis occupy distinct clinical categories, each with specified criteria and expected trajectories.

1. Schizophrenia

Core Features: hallucinations (hearing voices, seeing visions), delusions (false fixed beliefs), disorganized thought and speech, diminished motivation, and social withdrawal.

Course: chronic, often lifelong, with periods of relapse and remission.

Overlap with Junūn: Classical jurists would likely classify a severe schizophrenic episode as junūn ṭāriʾ (temporary insanity), since the person loses the ability to discern reality and act rationally.

Challenge: Schizophrenia often exists in fluctuating forms: at times the patient appears lucid, at other times detached from reality. This maps imperfectly onto the fiqh categories, creating ambiguity about when taklīf applies.

2. Bipolar Disorder

Core Features: episodes of mania (excessive energy, grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, risky behavior) alternating with depression (hopelessness, low energy, anhedonia).

Psychotic Features: In severe mania or depression, delusions or hallucinations may appear.

Overlap with Junūn: During severe manic or depressive episodes with psychosis, the person may meet the fiqh threshold of junūn ṭāriʾ. Yet during stable phases, they may function fully rationally.

Challenge: The cyclical nature of the illness raises the question: Are acts missed during episodes to be made up later, or excused as during sleep or unconsciousness? Classical texts differ, but none considered “bipolarity” as such.

3. Psychosis (General)

Core Features: A break with reality, often involving hallucinations, delusions, and profound disorganization.

Overlap with Junūn: Psychosis, whether brief or chronic, resembles the classical understanding of junūn most closely.

Challenge: Not all psychosis destroys intellect permanently. Many patients regain clarity with treatment, raising again the problem of fluctuating taklīf.

4. The Role of Medication

Antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, antidepressants: These are the pillars of psychiatric treatment.

Intended Effect: to reduce hallucinations, stabilize mood, and prevent relapse.

Unintended Effects: profound sedation, hypersomnia (sleeping most of the day), emotional flattening, and anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure or motivation).

Patient Testimonies:

“I feel like a zombie.”

“The voices are gone, but so is my will to live.”

“I sleep 16 hours a day. How can I pray?”

Here lies the unique modern dilemma: a patient may be technically sane (ʿaql intact, able to converse, not delusional), yet so chemically subdued that fulfilling religious obligations becomes nearly impossible.

5. The Fiqh Challenge

The classical categories assumed that junūn arose naturally or episodically, not as a result of long-term pharmacological suppression. Modern psychiatry has created a new condition:

ʿAql present but muted: The patient understands but cannot act.

Niyyah weakened: Intention becomes hollow when the will is chemically flattened.

Taklīf blurred: The patient is not majnūn, yet not fully functional as ʿāqil.

This “third state” — neither majnūn nor fully rational — demands renewed fiqh analysis.

Modern psychiatry reveals conditions far more nuanced than the binary of sane vs insane. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and psychosis produce fluctuating, partial, or chemically-induced impairments that the fuqahā’ never directly addressed. The use of medication complicates this further, introducing states of sedation and anhedonia that do not fit the classical models of junūn.

The pressing question, then, is: How should taklīf be understood for these millions of Muslims caught in this liminal space between sanity and insanity, volition and sedation?

Case Studies & Lived Experiences

The classical fuqahāʾ developed rulings on junūn from what they observed in society: men and women who wandered, raved, or sat in a state of incomprehension. Today, the realities of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and psychosis under modern drug regimens are subtler but no less debilitating. Listening to patients reveals the silenced soul — the ʿaql technically present, but suffocated beneath layers of medication, stigma, and despair.

1. The Schizophrenia Patient

“When the voices were loud, I couldn’t tell what was real. But when the doctor gave me medication, the voices stopped… and so did my life. I sleep all day. I can’t even wake up for ṣalāh. I know it’s fard, but I feel like a corpse.”

Fiqh Dilemma: Here the intellect is present, yet pharmacologically suppressed. Is he still mukallaf? If the Sharīʿah requires ṣalāh, but medication makes waking nearly impossible, how is obligation measured?

2. The Bipolar Patient

 “In mania, I feel invincible. I believe I am chosen, that I can speak with angels. Then in depression, I cannot even stand. My mother shakes me to pray, but I feel no will. I know Allah is there, but I cannot move.”

Fiqh Dilemma: Mania resembles junūn ṭāriʾ — delusions abolish rational perception. Depression resembles sleep or unconsciousness — obligation lifted temporarily. But what of missed prayers? Must they all be made up when the episode lifts?

3. The Psychotic Relapse

“Every time I stop my medication, the voices come back. They curse me, tell me I am damned. When I take the pills, the voices stop, but I feel dead inside. I don’t feel Allah, I don’t feel joy, I don’t feel anything.”

Fiqh Dilemma: This is neither loss of ʿaql nor its full presence — rather, a hollowing of spiritual affect. Should taklīf be measured by cognition alone, or also by the soul’s ability to form genuine niyyah and khushūʿ?

4. The Family’s Burden

 “My brother has schizophrenia. Some days he is normal, other days he talks to people who aren’t there. The imam tells us he must pray, the doctor says he cannot. We are lost — is Allah punishing us if he doesn’t?”

Fiqh Dilemma: Without a clear guideline, families oscillate between guilt and despair. The absence of a unified fatwā framework leaves them abandoned in uncertainty.

5. The Medication Trap

“The pills silence the noise but also silence my soul. I do not laugh, I do not cry, I only exist. They call this ‘treatment.’ But is this living? How can Allah hold me accountable when I am neither awake nor asleep, neither sane nor insane?”

Fiqh Dilemma: This testimony forces us to ask: does the maqṣad (higher objective) of preserving ʿaql truly justify medications that chemically extinguish it? Or must fiqh distinguish between restorative treatments and suppressive ones?

 The Central Question from Lived Experience

Patients’ voices converge on a single truth: they do not neatly fit into the classical categories of sane (ʿāqil) or insane (majnūn). Instead, they inhabit a liminal state of suppressed existence — awake yet asleep, rational yet inert, accountable yet incapable.

It is here that fiqh must expand its categories, lest it burden the sick beyond their capacity, or cut them off from the mercy of Allah’s law.

Fiqh Analysis: Mapping Classical Categories onto Modern Realities

The fuqahāʾ of the past, with limited medical science, articulated nuanced categories of mental dysfunction. These categories were functional: they determined accountability (taklīf), legal validity of contracts, and moral liability. Our task is to map modern psychiatric conditions onto these categories, identifying both continuities and gaps.

1. Schizophrenia

Classical Analogy:

Acute psychotic episodes (hallucinations, delusions, incoherence) → junūn ṭāriʾ (intermittent insanity).

Chronic, unremitting schizophrenia → junūn dāʾim (permanent insanity).

Taklīf:

During episodes: lifted, like sleep/unconsciousness.

During remission: restored.

Gap:

The medicated state (sedated, anhedonic, oversleeping) does not fit cleanly. He is not majnūn, yet incapacitated.

2. Bipolar Disorder

Classical Analogy:

Manic psychosis (grandiosity, delusions, reckless actions) → junūn ṭāriʾ.

Depressive stupor (immobility, inability to act) → analogized to sleep or coma, where taklīf is suspended.

Taklīf:

During mania/psychosis: lifted.

During depression: lifted if incapacity is total; modified if partial.

During stability: full obligations.

Gap:

Ambiguity remains about qaḍāʾ: must missed prayers during mania/depression be made up when stability returns? Classical jurists differed.

3. Psychosis (General)

Classical Analogy:

Fits closest to the definition of junūn: covering of the ʿaql.

Taklīf:

Absent during psychosis, restored after.

Gap:

No framework for recurrent psychosis triggered by medication withdrawal or stress.

4. Al-Maʿtūh (Feeble-Mindedness)

Modern Equivalent:

Could map to intellectual disability, mild psychotic states, or residual schizophrenia where the person functions but poorly.

Taklīf:

Obligations remain but adjusted to capacity.

Gap:

Modern psychiatry distinguishes cognitive deficits from psychosis, but fiqh merges them under maʿtūh.

5. The Medicated State

This is where the classical framework falters most. Psychiatric medication induces a state unknown to earlier fuqahāʾ:

Neither majnūn (insane) nor fully ʿāqil (sane).

Patient may grasp obligations intellectually but lack the will or energy to act.

Sedation mimics unconsciousness; anhedonia paralyzes niyyah.

This resembles a third category, distinct from junūn or maʿtūh:

al-ʿajz al-nafsī al-mustahdath — “pharmacologically induced psychological incapacity.”

Here, taklīf might not be lifted entirely, but modified:

shortened acts of worship,

allowance for missed prayers without qaḍāʾ if incapacity was total,

reliance on dhikr/duʿā as lighter substitutes.

6. Maqāṣid Considerations

The maqṣad of ḥifẓ al-ʿaql (preservation of intellect) underpins the prohibition of khamr and drugs that destroy reason.

But psychiatric medication paradoxically both “preserves” (prevents psychosis) and “suppresses” (induces sedation).

Fiqh must therefore differentiate between:

Restorative medication: preserves function → taklīf remains.

Debilitating medication: paralyzes function → taklīf suspended/modified.

Schizophrenia, bipolar, psychosis map loosely to junūn ṭāriʾ/dāʾim and maʿtūh.

Medication-induced states represent a new phenomenon not envisioned by classical jurists.

This calls for an expanded fiqh category acknowledging functional incapacity under pharmacological suppression….