Courses › Alone is not the same as lonely
Yourself and your limits
Alone is not the same as lonely
A gap rather than a headcount, a threat filter that makes you harder to reach, and an ummah that was never automatic.
If you have thought about ending your life, or you feel that nobody would notice if you were gone, that comes before anything on this page. Tell someone who is with you today, contact your doctor, or use your local emergency number. And if there is a person in your life who controls who you are allowed to see or speak to, that is a different problem from the one this course is about, and there are services for it. This course is not an emergency service.
Six short lessons on being lonely, including being lonely in a full house and a full masjid. It separates the count of people from the gap you feel, explains why loneliness quietly changes the way you read other people, and takes apart the idea that a Muslim who needs company is a weak one. One change is taught in lesson four, and it is deliberately small.
Who this is for
Anyone who has people around them and still feels unmet, anyone who has drifted out of contact and cannot see the way back, and anyone who has started assuming in advance that they are not wanted. Converts, people who have moved, and people who have left something they needed to leave will find this written with them in mind. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This course does not build you a ladder of social tasks to climb, and you should not build one for yourself from a page on the internet. Graded social approach work is exposure therapy, it is the treatment for social anxiety, and it belongs with a trained therapist who knows your situation. This course also does not process anything that happened to you, does not tell you to make up with any particular person, and does not send you to any particular mosque, group or organisation, because it has no way of knowing whether that place is safe for you. It gives no fatwa and no diagnosis, and it replaces neither a scholar nor a clinician.
The lessons
6- Alone is not the same as lonelyOne of these is a number you could count. The other is a gap, and the gap is the thing that hurts.
- Why loneliness makes you harder to reachLoneliness changes how you read other people, and that is the part that keeps it going.
- The ummah is not automatic, and isolation is not pietyBelonging is described in the Qur'an as work that gets done, not as something that switches on when you join.
- Small and repeated beats big and rareThe unit is two people and a reason to be in the same room, not a room full of strangers.
- What feeds itFour ordinary habits that keep the gap open, and the one you can change tonight.
- When loneliness has become depressionWhere the two overlap, where they part, and what asking for help actually involves.
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 3:103, 9:71, 12:86, 18:28, 20:29 to 32, 49:10, 49:13. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 12:86 is used as a model for naming grief aloud and not as an argument that a person should therefore tell no human being, since Yaqub was speaking to his sons when he said it. The scholar reviewer settles the permissible range of use.
- Sahih Muslim 2664, 2699; Sunan Abi Dawud 4833; Jami' at-Tirmidhi 2165, 2507. Only reports graded sound or good are used. Each report inside a lesson links to its full entry with its grading. The widely circulated narration about Islam beginning as a stranger is not quoted anywhere in this course, because its reference number and grading were not confirmed. The narration about the believers being one body is likewise not quoted, for the same reason.