You have never asked anyone about this. Not your imam, not the brother you pray beside every Friday, not the cousin who would probably understand more than you think.
You have searched it instead. At one in the morning, in a tab you closed before you finished the first result. You have read other people's answers to other people's questions and tried to make them fit. But you have never put your actual question to a human being who could actually answer it.
There is a reason, and it has nothing to do with the question being hard. The moment you ask, someone knows.
What the silence has already cost you
Count it honestly.
You have been guessing. Everything you believe about where you stand with Allah on this has been assembled out of half remembered khutbahs, forum posts by strangers, and whatever your nafs happens to whisper at the exact moment you need to hear it. Some of that guessing made you far harsher on yourself than Allah is. Some of it let you off a hook you were never off.
You have also been carrying a specific kind of question. Does my tawbah still count when I keep going back. Am I a hypocrite for standing in the front row. Do I have to tell my wife. Is the way I am with her now connected to what I used to watch. Is there something wrong with me in particular, that this has lasted this long.
Those questions do not fade when you refuse to ask them. They sit, and they get heavier, and an unanswered question at midnight is one of the most reliable relapse triggers there is. You can ignore it for years. You cannot outrun it.
So the silence was never free. It has been costing you clarity, and it has been costing you nights.
Half asking does not work
Some people try the middle road. They wait until after jumuah, catch a scholar on the way out, and describe a friend's problem. A cousin. Somebody at work.
They get a general answer, because a general question is the only one they were brave enough to ask. Then they walk home with something that does not fit their life, and the real question goes back in the drawer with the rest.
The problem was never that scholars are unreachable. Many of them would sit with you tomorrow. The problem is that asking in person means standing in front of a man with your name on your face and saying the words out loud, and almost nobody carrying this will do that. Shame is doing the thing shame is built to do, and we have written elsewhere about how shame keeps you stuck.
That is the exact obstacle Pure Path set out to remove. Not the scholar. The exposure.
Who the Sheikh is
Sheikh Abu Taymiyyah is the scholar Pure Path works with for this. He holds a live sitting every week for Muslims fighting what you are fighting, and he answers questions members send him privately from inside the app. His name and his picture appear with his permission. The schedule, the record of sittings already held and the full mechanics are on the Ask the Sheikh page.
He is not answering a room full of hypotheticals. He is answering questions written by people in the middle of this, which is a different job and it shows.
What happens when you send a question
Not reassurance. The actual sequence, in the order it happens.
You write it in the app. It goes to the Sheikh's team. It is never posted into the community, into a thread, or into the live chat. There is no path by which your question appears in a feed, and no setting you have to switch off to make that true.
It is stored encrypted. The text is encrypted at rest. Private is what you start on, not something you have to find in a menu.
It is read before anything happens to it. The small team around the Sheikh reviews questions before an answer is written and before anything is ever published. Not the community. Not other members.
You decide whether it can be published at all. When you send it you choose: keep it private, or allow the answer into the archive inside the app so the next person carrying the same thing can read it. Private is the default. Publication is something you opt into on purpose.
You decide separately whether a name appears. Allowing publication is one choice. Being named is another one entirely, and you can publish anonymously.
You can take the permission back. Change your mind before it goes up and it stays private. You can delete the question outright.
Read that again if you need to. Every gate in that sequence opens from your side only.
The live room
The weekly sitting is watched together, and that only works if nobody has to expose themselves to take part.
Brothers and sisters sit in separate rooms. Your name in the room is an anonymous one, and it is fixed at the moment you speak, so what you said last week stays attached to the same name and none of it reaches back into who you are outside. The room is moderated while it runs, not tidied up the next morning.
Nothing you type in that room is a question to the Sheikh. Questions take the private path above. The room is the room.
What this is not
If I oversell this you will feel it the first time you use it, and then nothing else on this page will be worth reading. So here are the edges.
Guidance, not a ruling. An answer is a scholar's guidance on what you have described, in the time a sitting allows. It is not a formal fatwa issued on a full case after everything has been examined, and it does not bind anyone.
No guaranteed reply. More questions arrive than one man can answer in an evening. Yours may not be reached. Being reached is not something membership buys, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
Not instant. This runs on a weekly rhythm. It is not a chat window, and nobody is on the other end at 2am waiting for you.
Not therapy, and not medical advice. Pure Path is a recovery app, not a clinic. Nothing said in a sitting replaces a doctor, a therapist, or medication you were prescribed.
Not for an emergency. If you are in danger, or you are thinking about harming yourself or anyone else, do not wait for a weekly sitting. Contact your local emergency number now, or find a crisis line in your country at findahelpline.com.
What it costs
Watching the sitting costs nothing. It is open on the website and in the app, free accounts included, and you can be reminded before the next one starts.
Sending a private question comes with Pure Path membership, and so does speaking in the live room. That is part of what keeps the room small enough to moderate properly. The app is free to download and the price is shown inside it, in your own currency.
I would rather put that sentence here than have you meet it at the moment you finally worked up the nerve to type a question.
How to write a question worth answering
You get better guidance when you give the man something to work with. A few things help.
Say what actually happened, not the cleaned up version. Vague questions get vague answers, and you did not come this far to be told to fear Allah more.
Ask one thing. If you have four questions, send the one that is keeping you awake. The other three usually turn out to be the same question wearing different clothes.
Include what you have already tried, and what happened when it failed. That single detail is often the whole answer.
Leave out the self flagellation. He is not there to sentence you. Describing yourself as filth at the top of the message just costs you the space you needed to explain the situation.
Why asking changes something
There is a reason the shaytan works this hard to keep you quiet.
A secret carried alone grows. You start to believe your case is the exception, that what you do is worse than what anybody else does, that the mercy covering the whole ummah somehow has a hole in it shaped exactly like you. None of that survives a real answer. Put the true question to someone qualified and the thing shrinks back to its actual size. Still serious. No longer infinite.
You also stop burning effort in the wrong direction. A lot of what exhausts people in this fight is fighting the wrong front, because they never checked. Five minutes of guidance can save you a year of aiming your willpower at something that was never the problem.
And the asking itself is part of the deen. You were never meant to run on guesswork.
Ask the people of knowledge if you do not know. (Quran 16:43)
You were told to ask. You were not told to ask loudly.
Start where it is cheap
You do not have to send anything today.
Start by watching. The first sitting is recorded and public, so you can watch it here and see how he handles this before you decide whether you want to be handled. That costs you nothing and nobody learns a thing about you.
Then, when you are ready, the question you have been carrying since you were fifteen goes into an encrypted box, gets read by a scholar's team, and stays out of every feed, every thread and every conversation in your life. Whether it ever becomes public is your call, twice over, and you can still take it back.
That is the whole offer. Smaller than it sounds. Bigger than you think.