Seeking the Better of Two Courses

Istikhara is the Islamic prayer for guidance, offered when a believer faces a decision and wishes to seek God's help in choosing the better course. Its name means "asking for what is good," and its basis is a well-attested teaching of the Prophet Muhammad, who is reported to have instructed his followers in a specific prayer for the purpose and to have urged them to make it before any matter of consequence. The one who prays it performs two voluntary units of prayer and then recites the supplication of istikhara, in which they acknowledge God's knowledge and power over what is hidden from them and ask that, if the matter in question is good for them in their religion, their life and their end, God make it possible and bless it, and that if it is harmful, God turn it away from them and turn them away from it, and grant them contentment with whatever is decreed.

The prayer is not a request for a dream or an omen, though popular practice has sometimes attached such expectations to it. In its proper form it is a submission of the decision to God combined with the believer's own reasoned effort and consultation: having prayed, the person proceeds as their judgment directs, trusting that God will incline matters toward what is best. Istikhara thus expresses a characteristic Islamic balance between reliance on God and human responsibility, placing the outcome in God's hands while leaving the deliberation and the action to the believer.