About Inshirah

Moustapha Djalal, MA, RP, a psychotherapist registered with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario, and Melissa Saumur, MSW, RSW, a social worker registered with the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers.

Inshirah is not their practice. Reading this site does not make you anyone’s client and does not create a therapeutic relationship. Nothing here is individual advice about you, because nothing here knows anything about you.

1. A theme is chosen from an area of life, and a specific, doable practice is written for it.
2. An āyah is matched to it, and a sound report of the Prophet where one fits. Qur’ān first.
3. A piece of published research is matched to it, retrieved and checked against Crossref, with its DOI recorded.
4. If it cannot carry both bases, it does not go in. It is swapped, not shipped half grounded.
5. A scholar reads the Islamic side. A clinician reads the psychological side. Until both have, the page says so.

2,852 practices are written and in review today.

Every practice carries one of three labels, and they are not decorative.

• Research showsMeta analysis, or more than one randomised trial.
• Research linksReplicated observational or longitudinal work.
• One line of researchA single study, or a theoretical account.

Two honest limits. Material drawn from couples work, including the Gottman and emotionally focused approaches, is well validated when a therapist delivers it in a room, and has not been shown to work as well delivered by a website. Read it as education, not as a treatment that has been tested in this form. And the evidence for religiously adapted therapy is clearest on engagement, that people stay with care that fits their faith, rather than on it outperforming ordinary good therapy.

Arabic Qur’ānic text is the Uthmānī script, Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim, which is not subject to copyright. English renderings of the Qur’ān quoted alongside it are short attributed excerpts from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an, Oxford University Press, 2004, and the attribution appears with every one.

Only reports graded ṣaḥīḥ or ḥasan are used, with the grading shown. Research is cited to the paper, not to a summary of it, and links to its DOI. The whole library is open at the source explorer, including the parts that are still thin.

There is no account, no email, no password and no profile. What you pick, what you save and which days you marked something done are held in a single cookie on your own device.

• Nothing about you is stored on our servers There is no user record to store.
• No third party analytics or advertising None, on any page.
• No journal There is nowhere to type anything private, deliberately, until this can be done properly.
• You can erase it Clearing your browser data for this site removes everything.

It is not therapy, not a diagnosis, not treatment, and not a fatwa. It does not tell you whether something is permitted, and where a question is genuinely religious it belongs with a qualified scholar, not with a website and not with a clinician.

If you are struggling in a way that needs more than this, here is where to go.

Corrections are welcome and wanted, particularly on the Islamic side. Write to admin@inshirah.org.