Stayatthenicheofrepentance

A short address from Ibn al-Jawzī (Sayd al-Khātir) for the one whose trial has outlasted his repentance — who says, "I repented; why has it not lifted?"

O sinner: when you feel the touches of recompense, do not raise a clamour, and do not say, "I have repented and regretted — so why has what I hate not been lifted from me?" Perhaps your repentance has not yet become real. And recompense has its season, which can stretch out like a long illness in which no device avails until its term runs out.

• Ādam wept over his slip for three hundred years.
• Ayyūb remained in his trial eighteen years.
• Ya'qūb wept for Yūsuf eighty years.

Trials have their appointed times, and then they pass — and some recompense stretches to the time of death itself.

What is required of you, then, is to stay at the mihrāb of inābah — to keep to the prayer-niche of turning back to Allah; to sit as a beggar sits; to let your food be concern and your drink be tears. For perhaps the bearer of glad news will arrive, and the grieving Ya'qūb will receive his sight back. And if you die in your prison — perhaps the grief of this world will stand in for the grief of the next, and in that is enormous profit.

A word from this site: Ibn al-Jawzī is describing perseverance at Allah's door through a long trial — the patience of Ayyūb and Ya'qūb — not hopelessness. The same tradition insists that despair of Allah's mercy is itself forbidden; the beggar at the door is there because he is certain the House is generous.