It’s impossible,” a Canadian man by the username Abu Khadeer says. “There’s no way we can talk about sex, or anything to do with sex inside a mosque. It also was clear that despite thinking about marriage for much of their lives, none of these men had been prepared for what would happen on their wedding nights. While the men I spoke to had joined the group for different reasons - some wanted to stop watching porn others used to the group to manage depression and anxiety - nearly all of them wanted to get married in a halal (Islamically permissible) way, and were worried that their affinity for porn and masturbation would nullify their marriages in the eyes of God. “All we’re trying to do is serve Allah, and to do what he commanded us to do,” the MuslimNoFapper adds. As one told me, “The main NoFap community is largely aiming to somehow assert their masculinity through control of themselves, with the hope of sleeping with women outside of marriage.” Conversely, the MuslimNoFap community is designed to uphold the sanctity of Nikah (marriage), which also means that “any form of sexual activity is prohibited until made permissible by Allah.”
But according to members of MuslimNoFap, who all wished to remain anonymous, their community is much different. On the surface, it might seem like the normal Reddit No Fap community, a group of men whose choice of abstinence is largely driven by a desire for self-improvement. In addition to private groups on Facebook (Mamood’s has more than two hundred members) and WhatsApp, the biggest support network is on Reddit, where the MuslimNoFap subreddit has about two thousand followers. Like many Muslim men in Mamood’s situation - i.e., finding themselves unable to talk about sex, masturbation or porn in deeply religious communities, where such things are considered taboo - he turned to the internet for help. But we live in a society where pornography is widespread, so even when I wasn’t looking for porn, it was just there.” “I knew what I was doing was wrong… I’ve always known that. As he was doing so, however, he continued looking at pornography. Mamood tells me that as he grew older - and with Islamic marriage on his mind - he attempted to become a more devout Muslim. I wanted to figure out what was happening to my body.” Not because of a sinful sexual attraction. “It started, like most boys, with wet dreams. Calling me from a cafe in central Birmingham, far away from his home, he says that he started masturbating in his late teens “without really knowing what I was doing.” This makes what he calls an “addiction” to masturbation even harder to talk about. He lives in a neighborhood almost entirely filled with Muslim families, all of whom know each other, attend the same social events and congregate at the same mosque. He’s a practicing Muslim who prays five times a day and teaches children in madrassa (Islamic school). Mamood, 27, lives in Birmingham, one of Britain’s largest cities and home to the country’s largest Muslim population outside of London. May Allah, the greatest, the most kind, the most merciful, forgive me.” “I did it again,” he typed to the members of a private Facebook group. Every so often, he peered over his shoulder, just in case someone was still awake and could come into his room. On a Friday night a few weeks ago, Ibrahim “Ibby” Mamood was frantically typing on his laptop, shaking, with droplets of sweat dripping from his forehead.
This story is republished from MEL Magazine, a new men’s digital magazine that understands that there’s no playbook for how to be a guy.