Marife Turkish Journal of Religious Studies

Abstract

Spiritual Counseling and Guidance is a professional support service that helps individuals and families seek solutions to life challenges by drawing upon their spiritual and religious resources. As in all professions, ethical principles in spiritual counseling and guidance are of great importance in terms of reliability, professionalism, and professional responsibility. The growing prevalence of this field in Türkiye necessitates grounding the profession in clear and solid ethical foundations and defining the boundaries of professional service explicitly.
The ethical principles guiding spiritual counselors ensure that professional practices are carried out within a reliable, consistent framework that protects clients’ rights. These principles determine how counselors should establish relationships with clients, society, and colleagues, how they should fulfill their professional responsibilities, and how they should act when facing ethical dilemmas. Trust is the cornerstone of the spiritual counseling and guidance process. For a profession that directly engages with the spiritual and emotional world of human beings, the presence of ethical standards is crucial to ensuring professionalism and fostering clients’ trust in their counselors. In Türkiye, the field of spiritual counseling and guidance is still emerging and does not yet have established professional ethical principles. However, in the Christian context, where this field has historically developed, ethical principles have been elaborated in detail through years of research, experience, and consultation. Among these are ethical codes specifically developed for Muslim spiritual counselors.
This study aims to comparatively examine the ethical codes of Muslim spiritual counseling and guidance organizations operating in the United States and to explore their relationship with the virtue ethics framework. For this purpose, the document analysis method, one of the qualitative research methods, was employed. The data source consisted of the ethical codes of four Muslim spiritual counseling and guidance organizations in the U.S.: The Muslim Endorsement Council (MEC), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), The Association of Muslim Chaplains (AMC), and The Muslim Women’s Organization (MWO).
In the first phase of the research, the ethical code documents established by long-standing spiritual counseling and guidance organizations in the U.S. were analyzed using content and thematic analysis techniques. The ethical codes were thematically classified, and subcategories were identified under each theme. Nine overarching themes emerged, encompassing counselors’ personal and professional responsibilities, relationships with clients, colleagues, and students, community interactions, and research ethics.
In the second phase, the ethical code texts were examined within the framework of Islamic virtue ethics, focusing on how fundamental virtues such as justice/truthfulness (ʿadl/ṣidq), wisdom (ḥikmah), temperance/chastity (ʿiffah), and courage (shajāʿah)—as well as process virtues such as sincerity, love, respect, and trust, and outcome virtues such as compassion (raḥmah) and generosity/benevolence (karam/iḥsān)—were reflected in the texts.
The analysis of the ethical codes of these four Muslim counseling and guidance organizations demonstrates a significant alignment between the ethical codes and the classical Islamic teachings on virtue ethics. According to the findings, fundamental, process, and outcome virtues each serve as key foundations shaping the ethical principles; notably, virtues such as justice, wisdom, temperance, and compassion are not treated as abstract ideals but are transformed into functional principles that guide the counseling process.
The strong relationship identified between the ethical foundations of spiritual counseling and guidance and virtue ethics indicates that the profession must essentially be conducted with moral sensitivity at its core.