Two Questions for the Mad: Did You Find God, or Take Your Meds?

In the eighteenth century, Bethlem Royal Hospital in London — the place the city’s tongue had worn down to “Bedlam” — drew roughly 96,000 visitors a year. They did not come seeking treatment. For a penny, anyone could walk the wards, move among the chained patients, and watch their reactions as an evening’s entertainment.

In the same century, in another part of the world, a man who had visibly lost his grip on worldly reason was approached with reverence inside a Sufi lodge. People listened for a divine signal in his words. The same condition. Two responses that could not be further apart.

Madness compresses everything into a single question: where does the boundary of reason end, and where does the human being begin? Sufi Islam and Enlightenment Europe meet head-on at exactly that question.

The Man Reciting Poetry in the Desert

The Arabic root of the word majnun is unsettling: it means “one seized by jinn.” Sufi tradition kept the word and turned it into something else entirely. Majnun ceased to be the name of a disorder and became the name of divine love.

The most familiar version of the story is Layla and Majnun. Majnun wanders the desert, hair matted, dust-covered, composing verse without pause. The Sufis do not read him as the victim of a small, human infatuation. For them, Majnun is the image of a soul so consumed by love for God that it has burned through the vessel of ordinary mind.

There is also a more literal layer to the tale. Majnun is originally a young man named Qays. His love for Layla makes him “mad” in the eyes of his community. But Sufi poets — from Nizami to Fuzuli — took that story out of the register of tragedy and placed it inside allegory. In their hands, Layla is no longer a woman; she is a face of divine beauty. “Madness” here is not a diagnosis. It is the price of the highest love. The person the community called deranged had, in fact, seen further than any of them.

This reading did not stay confined to literary metaphor. Al-Hallaj (858–922) one day said Ana al-Haqq — “I am the Truth,” or more precisely, “I am the Real,” since al-Haqq is one of the names of God. The scholars and rulers of his era heard a blasphemy. The cost was execution: a thousand lashes, the severing of his hands and feet, the gibbet, the beheading, the ashes scattered into the Tigris. Yet the Sufi tradition counted him neither mad nor heretical. For them, al-Hallaj had reached fana — the state in which the self dissolves entirely into God, so that what spoke through him was not his own voice but the divine attribute itself. What looked, from the outside, like the ravings of a broken mind was, from the inside, the clearest possible sight of reality.

This is where Sufi tradition shows its deepest courage: reading madness not as “failing to understand” but as “having understood too much.” Most cultures declare what they cannot comprehend dangerous. This tradition does the opposite — incomprehensibility becomes not a deficiency but a mark of depth. That said, it was never a license for anything-goes mysticism. Sufi tradition maintained a subtle discernment between the genuine majzub — one genuinely seized by divine states — and the simply ill. The point was not to sanctify every form of frenzy, but to acknowledge that certain conditions cannot be weighed on the scale of ordinary rationality.

The Triumph of Reason and the Iron Door

In seventeenth-century Europe, something entirely different happened: the mad were locked away. The French philosopher Michel Foucault called it the “Great Confinement.” The Hôpital Général opened in Paris in 1657; Bedlam had been operating in London for centuries but underwent a decisive transformation in the same period. These were not simply medical institutions. Beggars, prostitutes, and the insane were pressed behind the same walls.

The story of Bedlam makes the logic concrete. The hospital had been opening its doors to paying spectators since as early as 1610. Lord Percy paid ten shillings that year to tour the wards and observe the inmates. Over time, the practice became a revenue stream: a penny at the gate, and anyone could enter. The custom continued until 1770. At its peak, around 96,000 people visited per year — numbers that would not embarrass a modern tourist attraction.

What matters is not the cruelty alone but the worldview underneath it. The Enlightenment was the age of order, classification, and productivity. The person who could not work, could not reason, could not contribute to the social whole had no place in that picture. The “irrational” had to be made invisible, taken behind walls. Foucault’s point cuts deep: Bedlam did not merely house the sick. It represented a civilization fleeing its own shadow. An age that worshipped reason had decided that the absence of reason was a kind of crime.

The root of the difference lies not in geography but in the answer each tradition gives to the question “what is a human being?” In Sufi thought, individual reason is something like a veil — a layer that stands between the person and God, something to be transcended rather than enthroned. In the Enlightenment tradition, reason is both the definition of the human and its highest virtue. Recall Descartes’s famous line: I think, therefore I am. That sentence builds the human being entirely on the foundation of rational thought. One tradition sees a reality beyond reason; the other treats reason as the very ground of reality.

Placed side by side, the two perspectives open onto a vertiginous question: if both could look at the same person and see something so utterly different, how much of what we call “normal” belongs to us — and how much is simply the boundary drawn by the map we happened to be born inside? The Majnun wandering the desert, had he been born in London, might well have been chained to a wall while strangers paid a penny to stare.

Where Each Tradition Gets It Right

What’s striking about the Sufi tradition is that its strength lies precisely in its honesty. Some things cannot be reached by reason; Sufi thought does not deny this, it states it plainly. Control and logic do not give a complete picture of the world. Contemporary psychiatry is now actively debating whether certain mystical experiences constitute pathology at all, or simply a different register of consciousness. Sufi tradition sensed this centuries before the clinical vocabulary existed.

What emerges from the Enlightenment tradition, in turn, is a strong sense of accountability. Approaching madness systematically — asking what it is, why it appears, how it can be treated — laid the foundation for modern neurology and psychology. Foucault’s critique exposes the shadow side of that system, and the critique is just. But the same rational curiosity, over time, made genuine treatment possible. The cost was high; yet the gain of bringing systematic inquiry to human suffering cannot be dismissed. The medications, therapies, and diagnoses that hold a person up in the depths of a serious crisis are the distant children of that cold-looking curiosity.

Both traditions, in the end, are trying to protect the same person — but by opposite roads. One shelters the person inside the sacredness of their experience; the other inside the possibility of their recovery. One tradition’s compassion moves through reverence; the other’s through intervention. Perhaps the most mature position is to refuse to set these two against each other — to hold them as two hands, each compensating for what the other cannot reach. While one guards meaning, the other quiets the pain.

I came across a sentence in a book recently: thoughts cannot be controlled; trying to stop them is beside the point. More importantly, thoughts say nothing about character. Character is shaped by the choices we make in living — not by the thoughts that suddenly crowd the mind. The first time I read that, it felt slightly odd. Then I understood: judging a person by what moves through their mind may say less about them than it does about the one doing the judging. A thought arrives uninvited — you did not summon it, and it does not represent you.

One culture asks the mad person: “Did you find God?” Another asks: “Did you take your meds?” Both have something right. What the question reveals, though, is not the person being asked — it reveals the one doing the asking. Because how we see another human being usually tells us more about who we are than about who they are.

S.K.C. written on 2 July 2026 in Vienna.