When convicted serial killer Ted Bundy delivered his final interview the day before his 1989 execution, he did not plead for mercy or offer excuses — he issued a warning. Describing how he had first encountered softcore pornography outside his home at the age of twelve or thirteen, and how his appetite had escalated relentlessly through each stage, Bundy revealed that every man he met in prison who was motivated to commit violence had been, without exception, deeply involved in pornography. This chilling confession sits at the heart of a vital episode of The Deen Show, in which host Eddie and Imam Isa Wood illuminate something Islam established through Prophetic hadith over fourteen centuries ago and that modern psychology is only now beginning to confirm: pornography is not merely a moral failing or a private habit — it is a direct assault on faith, a mechanism that erodes iman from the inside out, and, as the evidence increasingly shows, a weapon being deployed against humanity with devastating effect.
The Prophetic Warning That Modern Science Is Only Catching Up To
A Psychology Today article — ironically titled “Watch More Porn” — set Imam Isa Wood on a path of deep research when he discovered that its own content confirmed a disturbing correlation: pornography use directly leads to faith crises. What struck him most profoundly was the recognition that this was not a new discovery at all. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ had already articulated this reality in a hadith narrated by Abu Hurairah (may Allah be pleased with him): laa yaznil zaani heena yaznee wa huwa mu’min — a person does not commit zina while they are in a state of complete iman. The traditional explanation of the scholars is precise: when a person moves toward that sin, they must temporarily suspend their internal awareness — of Allah watching them, of the angels recording their deeds, of their accountability on the Day of Judgement. That light of faith dims just long enough to commit the act. And pornography, as a further hadith clarifies, constitutes zina of the eyes, ears, and hands — the lustful gaze, sexually explicit content consumed through sound, and the physical actions that accompany it. It is not a lesser transgression; it triggers the same mechanism of faith-erosion as physical zina, creating precisely the cognitive dissonance that secular researchers have now independently documented. The internal conflict between one’s identity as a Muslim and one’s behaviour becomes unbearable — and the soul eventually tips one way or the other: toward tawbah and Allah, or toward abandoning the deen altogether to silence the guilt.
“That guilt you feel — it is not a problem to be solved by watching more. It is a gift from Allah. It is a check-engine light telling you that what you are doing is destroying you. The secular solution is to smash the light. The Islamic solution is to fix what is wrong.” — Imam Isa Wood, The Deen Show
- The Prophet ﷺ identified zina of the eye, ear, tongue, hand, and foot — pornography fulfils at least three of these simultaneously and simultaneously triggers the departure of iman.
- Committing major sin requires the believer to temporarily suppress their awareness of Allah, the angels, and the Day of Judgement — the very pillars upon which faith stands.
- Prolonged exposure creates a state of internal spiritual dissonance: the fitra knows the act is wrong, but the habit persists — until the person sides with the sin over the repentance.
- Psychology Today’s own research confirms that religious people — Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists — are those most likely to experience a crisis of faith through pornography use; those without religion feel no such conflict because there is no spiritual light left to extinguish.
- Secular psychology’s proposed solution — consume more to normalise it and eliminate the guilt — is, in Islamic terms, advice to destroy the warning signal rather than address the underlying harm.
- Even from a purely physiological standpoint, pornography leads to erectile dysfunction, relational dysfunction, and an inability to form genuine bonds with other human beings — harm that holds regardless of one’s faith.
A Generation Leaving the Deen — And the Straight Path Back to Allah
The scale of this crisis is not theoretical. Between 2007 and 2014, the category of “nones” — atheists, agnostics, and the religiously non-affiliated — grew by nearly twenty million in the United States alone, with the sharpest rise among millennial men: the first generation in history to grow up with unrestricted internet access to pornography, and for whom, by 2010, 75% of consumption had migrated to smartphones. Imam Isa Wood, who has visited close to two hundred Muslim communities across the country, observes the same pattern everywhere: youth who have quietly checked out of their deen without formally declaring they have left Islam, or who have abandoned the religion outright. He personally knows individuals who were praying five times a day at the masjid, fasting on Mondays and Thursdays, attending Islamic classes — and then, following unguarded access to the internet, simply disappeared from the deen. The connection to pornography was not speculation; they admitted it. The FBI’s own study on serial homicide identified pornography as the most common shared interest among serial killers. Journalist Chris Hedges, who interviewed adult performers expecting willing participants, found instead that every one of them exhibited signs of PTSD — and that many numbed themselves with opioids before filming simply to endure the acts. This is the content that children as young as six can stumble upon accidentally, and that studies suggest 94% of children have encountered by the age of fourteen. And in at least one documented case — when the Israeli military seized Palestinian television stations in 2002 and broadcast pornography around the clock — it has been used as a deliberate weapon of social and spiritual destabilisation, confirming what Imam Isa Wood argues plainly: those in power understand that pornography breaks up families, triggers faith crises, fills people with anger and emptiness, and divides society.
“I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me — and without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography. Without question, without exception.” — Ted Bundy, the day before his execution, January 1989
The mercy of Islam is that no sin — however entrenched — places a believer beyond the reach of Allah’s forgiveness, and the guidance of this deen has never left its people without a path back. Imam Isa Wood’s seven-point recovery framework begins exactly where it must: with tawbah — a sincere acknowledgement of the wrong, a turning toward Allah, and a genuine plea for forgiveness. This is followed by the restoration of salah, because pornography places the believer in a state of ritual impurity and, crucially, it is the prayer that Shaytan moves first to steal. The Quran warns believers explicitly not to follow the incremental steps of the devil — yaa ayyuhal ladhina aamanoo laa tattabi’oo khutuwaatish shaytan — because those steps, as Ted Bundy’s own life demonstrated and as the Islamic tradition long affirmed, lead from what appears harmless to what is catastrophic. The guilt that secular culture seeks to medicate away through more consumption is not an illness — it is a mercy from Allah, proof that the fitra is still alive and calling the soul home. For parents, the most urgent spiritual investment is not merely a parental filter on the family router, but a living, practised Islam in the home — daily prayer, connection to community, purposeful guidance, and honest conversation — because a heart filled with the light of iman and the love of Allah is the only fortress that Shaytan, for all his schemes, cannot breach from within.
