Why I built this app

I am a Muslim software engineer. My wife is one of the most consistent practitioners of muhasaba I have met — she has kept a nightly reflection habit for years, working through the classical three-step framework that Al-Ghazali describes in the Ihya: review the day honestly, acknowledge where you fell short with tawbah, carry one specific intention forward. She did this in a paper notebook, and occasionally in apps that were not built for it.

The apps were the problem. Generic journaling apps have no concept of niyyah, no understanding of the prayer rhythm as a structural framework, no way to track the virtue patterns — sabr, shukr, tawbah, tawakkul — that muhasaba is actually trying to surface. Habit trackers turned the practice into a checkbox. AI journaling apps asked questions that had nothing to do with the Islamic tradition. The closest thing that existed was a notes app and a lot of willpower.

So I built Muhasaba. The app is structured around what the practice actually requires: a short reflection after Isha, a Quranic verse relevant to what you wrote, an insight drawn from the day's patterns, one small action for tomorrow, and a dhikr to close. Over time it tracks which virtues appear most and least in your reflections — not to grade you, but to show you what your character looks like when you are honest about it.

The practice, not the app

This site exists to explain the practice first. The app is one way to do muhasaba — not the only way. If you read what muhasaba al-nafs actually means and decide to do it with a pen and paper, that is exactly the right outcome. If an app removes enough friction that you do it consistently when you otherwise would not, that is also the right outcome.

The content on this site — the articles on muraqaba, Islamic productivity, and the Islamic daily routine — is written from inside the tradition, not as an explanation of Islam to outsiders. I am not a scholar. Where I cite Al-Ghazali or Ibn Al-Qayyim, I cite specific works and specific passages, because the tradition is precise and deserves to be represented precisely.

Privacy, by design

What you write in a muhasaba is not meant to be shared. It is the honest accounting you give yourself before Allah — the things you noticed about your own character that day, the shortcomings you acknowledged, the intentions you carried forward. That content has no business being used to train AI models, to generate advertising profiles, or to be stored in a way that any third party can access.

Your reflections in the Muhasaba app are not used to train AI. They are not visible to us. You can delete everything at any time. The privacy policy is written in plain language — not because we are required to have one, but because you should know exactly what happens to your words.

Get in touch

If you have feedback on the app, a question about the practice, or something that should be corrected in the content here, I read everything at support@muhasaba.me.

More of my work is at zamanishtiyaq.work.