Courses › The feeling that arrives after the scroll
Yourself and your limits
The feeling that arrives after the scroll
A measuring habit, a standard that keeps rising, and a verse that was never about your face.
Six short lessons on the flat feeling that turns up after you put the phone down. It explains why comparison is an ordinary thing a mind does rather than a defect in you, what a feed changes about it, and how honest the research on this really is, which is more honest than most of what you have read. It corrects the claim that a Muslim has been told their worth is their appearance or their output. One change is taught in lesson four, and it is not deleting the app.
Who this is for
Anyone who comes off the phone feeling smaller than they went on. It is not only about appearance. The same machinery runs on income, marriage, children, memorisation and how religious other people look. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This course does not do body image work with you. Mirror exercises, photograph confrontation, and any instruction to post an unedited picture or go out differently in order to test a fear are exposure treatments, and they belong with a trained clinician who knows your situation. There is no food, eating or weight advice anywhere in it. There is no detox challenge and no streak, because a countdown is a number you can lose. This course gives no fatwa and no diagnosis, and it replaces neither a scholar nor a clinician.
The lessons
6- The feeling that arrives after the scrollIt does not arrive while you are looking. It arrives in the minute after you put the phone down.
- A measuring habit, and what the feed does to itComparing yourself to people is not a character flaw. It is how a mind works out where it stands.
- You are not being told your worth is your faceThe criterion is stated plainly in the text, and it is not visible in a photograph.
- The one change, and it is not deleting the appSelf esteem asks you to win the measuring. There is another thing, and it does not need a verdict.
- What keeps it goingFour ordinary things that keep the gap open, and the instruction the sunnah actually gives.
- When this is something elseThree things this can turn out to be, what a first appointment is like, and what we will not do to you.
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 12:84, 13:28, 20:131, 49:13, 57:20, 94:5 to 6, 95:4 to 5, 102:1 to 2. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 13:28 and 95:4 are both quoted in the course specifically in order to refuse a common reading of them. The scholar reviewer settles the permissible range of use.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 5678, 6490; Sahih Muslim 2564, 2963, 2999. Only reports graded sound or good are used. Sunan Abi Dawud 4903, the line about envy devouring good deeds, is graded weak by al-Albani on sunnah.com. It is discussed by name in lesson three and is not cited as evidence anywhere. The circulated saying that contentment is a treasure that never ends is not used, because no sound attribution for it was found.