Istikhara is two units of voluntary prayer followed by a specific supplication asking that if the matter is good for the person's religion, livelihood and outcome, God make it easy and bless it, and if not, turn it away and turn the person away from it. The tradition is emphatic about what it is not: it is not divination, and the widespread folk expectation of a dream or a colour-coded sign is not what the texts describe. Scholars from Ibn Hajar onward stress that the person prays and then proceeds with whatever they were inclined to do, and reads the outcome afterwards. It is prayed before marriages, job offers, migrations and business decisions, and in many families a relative or a shaykh is asked to pray it on someone's behalf — which most jurists regard as missing the point, since the prayer is a way of committing your own decision rather than outsourcing it.