Courses › A loss other people cannot see
Grief and loss
A loss other people cannot see
Grief for a future, with no body, no funeral and no witnesses, and a set of forwarded messages that turn out not to be sound.
If you are having thoughts of ending your life, tell someone today and contact your doctor or an emergency service today. If the loss is coming back in images that arrive without warning, or in nightmares, if you are avoiding more and more places and people because of it, or if you feel detached from your own body or that things are not real, that is a different picture from grief and it has its own treatment. Take it to a clinician rather than to a course.
Six short lessons for infertility, miscarriage and stillbirth. It names what has happened as a bereavement and explains why it is treated as less than one, which is a mechanism rather than an accident. It corrects the theology gently, including the widely forwarded reports about a miscarried child that are graded weak, and it puts the sound material in their place. The one change it teaches is not a technique. It is giving the loss standing in the world.
Who this is for
Anyone who has lost a pregnancy at any stage, anyone who has had a stillbirth, and anyone who has been trying for a child for a long time and is grieving something month after month. It is also for a husband, who is very often grieving without anyone asking him about it. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This course does not process the loss with you. It will not ask you to describe the scan, the delivery, the phone call or the moment you were told, and it will not ask you to write letters to your child or to go back over it in order to feel less. Repeated revisiting is a treatment, it belongs with a trained clinician, and building it yourself from a webpage goes wrong. This course gives no fatwa. It will not tell you whether your child is washed, shrouded, named or prayed over, because the schools differ and that is your scholar's answer to give. It does not claim that anything you feel affects whether you conceive.
The lessons
6- A loss other people cannot seeIt is a bereavement. Here is why almost nobody treats it as one, and why that is not in your head.
- Grief without a body and without a storyWhat is being grieved, what is missing, and how a grief with no witnesses changes shape.
- Your child has a status, and some of what you were sent is not soundThe messages people forward, how they are actually graded, and the sound material that nobody sends.
- Give the loss a placeNot processing. Standing. One act of acknowledgement, chosen by you.
- What keeps the wound openThe dates, the sentences, the pressure to try again, and the verses that get used against you.
- When grief has become something elsePlain markers, what prolonged grief and trauma after loss look like, and how to ask without being told to move on.
It is written and sourced and it has not yet been read by a scholar and a clinician. Read it as a draft, and if something in it is wrong please write to admin@inshirah.org so it can be corrected.
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:155 to 2:157, 3:38 to 3:40, 8:28, 14:39, 18:46, 19:2 to 19:6, 21:89 to 21:90, 42:49 to 42:50, 64:15, 94:5 to 94:6. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 18:46, 8:28, 64:15 and 94:5 to 94:6 are each used in the course only alongside the correction of how they are commonly deployed against a bereaved or infertile person. The scholar reviewer settles the permissible range of use.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 1248, 1249, 5641, 5678; Sahih Muslim 2632; Sunan Abi Dawud 2050, 2837, 3180; Jami' at-Tirmidhi 1031, 2038. Only reports graded sound or good are used, and each report inside a lesson links to its full entry with its grading. Three widely circulated reports are named in lesson three as weak or contested and are deliberately not cited as evidence anywhere: Sunan Ibn Majah 1609, Sunan Ibn Majah 1608, and the house of praise narration at Jami' at-Tirmidhi 1021. The report that the Prophet wept at the death of his son Ibrahim is not used, because no gradable reference for it was confirmed.