Curingenvyinyourownheart—theknowledgecureandtheactioncure

Two medicines, one disease

Hasad is among the great diseases of the heart — and the diseases of the heart are treated only with knowledge and action. This is al-Ghazali's treatment plan, as carried in al-Qasimi's Maw'izat al-Mu'minin, and it reads like the oldest cognitive therapy in the world: first change what you know, then do the opposite of what the disease demands, until the heart follows.

The knowledge cure

The knowledge that heals envy is to know — with real certainty, not as a slogan — that envy harms you in this world and in your religion, and harms the envied person in neither; in fact it benefits him in both. Once you know this with clear sight — unless you are your own enemy and your enemy's friend — you will leave envy behind.

How envy harms your religion

By envying, you have resented the decree of Allah: hated the blessing He divided among His servants and the justice He established in His dominion by His hidden wisdom — you found His arrangement objectionable and ugly. This is an offence against the very pupil of tawhid's eye, a speck in the eye of faith. Added to it: you wished ill to a believer, abandoned his good counsel, and parted company with Allah's prophets and friends — who love good for His servants — to stand instead with Iblis and the disbelievers, who love that believers suffer and lose their blessings. These are corruptions in the heart that devour its good deeds as fire devours wood, erasing them as night erases day.

How envy harms your life

You suffer by your own envy: you are in unbroken grief, because Allah does not stop pouring blessings on the people you resent — so every blessing you see torments you, and every calamity that misses them pains you. You remain gloomy, deprived, scattered of heart, tight of chest. The very thing your enemies would wish upon you, you have inflicted on yourself. You wanted misfortune for your rival — and your own misfortune arrived instantly, cash in hand. And meanwhile, the blessing does not leave the envied person because of your envy. Even someone who did not believe in resurrection and judgement, if he were sensible, would flee envy for this alone — the heart's pain, with zero yield. How then one who knows the punishment that envy carries into the Hereafter! How strange the sane man who volunteers for Allah's anger, gaining nothing, carrying harm, wrecking his religion and his life for no return at all.

Why the blessing will not budge

What Allah has decreed of favour must run until a term He has appointed; there is no trick against it — everything with Him is by measure, and every term has its book. It is even related that a prophet complained to Allah of a tyrannical woman who dominated the people, and was told: flee from before her until her days run out — that is: what We decreed in eternity is not changed; be patient until the span We have written for her fortune expires. (A related tale, told for its lesson.)

And perhaps you say: if only envy could actually strip the blessing away! That is the height of ignorance — for it is a calamity you would be calling down first upon yourself. You too do not lack an envier; if blessings left by envy, no blessing of Allah would remain on you or on any creature — not even the blessing of faith, for the disbelievers envy the believers their faith:

What the envier wants simply does not come about. And to wish that your envy worked while everyone else's did not — every foolish envier wishes for exactly that privilege, and you are no more entitled to it than they. That blessings do not fall to envy is itself a blessing of Allah upon you — one you owe thanks for, while in your ignorance you resent it.

How the envied person actually profits from your envy

In his religion: he is wronged by you — especially once envy pushes you into speech and action, backbiting him, disparaging him, exposing him, listing his faults. These are gifts you are sending him: you are handing him your good deeds, so that you will meet him on the Day of Resurrection bankrupt, stripped of blessing there as you were stripped of contentment here. You wished a blessing away from him — and instead added blessing to his blessing, and misery to your own misery.

In his worldly life: what people most want is the grief of their enemies — and no torment matches the torment you are in. Your enemy's dearest wish is fulfilled not by your death but by your long life, in the torture of your envy, watching Allah's favour on him and choking. As the poet says:

May your enemies not die — rather live long,
to see in you the thing that eats them.
Envied still, and still in blessing — stay so:
the complete one is the one they envy.

Your enemy's joy at your envy-grief is greater than his joy in his own blessing. If he knew you had been freed of that pain, it would be the greatest calamity he could suffer. In your envy, you are exactly what your enemy ordered.

Iblis's subtler theft: the reward of love

There is a finer trick underneath. When Iblis saw that you could not match the blessed person — his knowledge, his piety, his standing, his wealth — he feared something: that you might love him for it, and so share in his reward. For whoever loves good for the Muslims is a partner in their good; the one who cannot reach the rank of the great is not denied the reward of loving them. The Prophet ﷺ said — in the hadith of the Bedouin who asked about the Hour, saying he had prepared no great amount of prayer or fasting, "except that I love Allah and His Messenger" — "You are with those you love." (Agreed upon.) Anas said: after Islam itself, nothing made the Muslims so glad — "we love the Messenger of Allah, and Abu Bakr and Umar, though we have not done their deeds, and we hope to be with them." Abu Musa asked about the man who loves those who pray but does not pray as they do, loves those who fast but does not fast as they do — and he ﷺ said: "He is with those he loves." (Agreed upon.) And a man said to Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz: it used to be said, be a scholar; if you cannot, be a student; if you cannot, then love them; and if you cannot, then at least do not hate them. Umar answered: "SubhanAllah — Allah has left us a way out."

So Iblis, fearing that reward for you, made the blessed man hateful to you — cutting you off from the reward of love as you were already cut off from the deeds. And he did not stop until you sinned outright. The source also records the saying, "The people of Paradise are three: the doer of good, the one who loves him, and the one who refrains from harming him" — noting explicitly that it has no basis as a hadith — and observes bitterly how Iblis walls the envier off from all three doors at once. Perhaps you even envy a scholar, and wish he would err in the religion of Allah and be disgraced, wish his tongue struck dumb or his body sick — what sin outweighs that?

The archer whose arrows come back

If your state were unveiled to you in a dream, you would see yourself as an archer shooting at his enemy to kill him — and the arrow turns back and puts out his own right eye. Enraged, he shoots again, harder — and it returns and blinds the other. His fury grows; he shoots a third time, and it comes back and splits his skull — while his enemy stands untouched, and his enemies stand around him laughing. That is the envier — and his case is worse than the archer's: the returning arrow only cost eyes that death would have taken anyway, but envy returns carrying sin, and sin does not die with the body; it drives towards Allah's anger and the Fire. Better his eye had gone in this world than that it be kept to lead him into the Fire.

See how Allah avenges the envied on the envier: he wanted the blessing removed from his rival — it was not removed; and it was removed from him: for safety from sin is a blessing, and freedom from grief is a blessing, and both left him. It is the truth of His word:

And rarely does a gloater gloat over a misfortune without being tried by its like. Aishah, may Allah be pleased with her, said: "I never wished anything upon Uthman but that it befell me — until, had I wished him killed, I would have been killed." And that is the sin of envy alone — before counting what envy drags behind it: quarrelling, denial of truth, the loosing of tongue and hand into outrages in pursuit of revenge. It is the disease in which the former nations perished. These are the knowledge-medicines: whoever turns them over with a clear mind and a present heart finds the fire of envy going out in his chest, knowing it destroys him, delights his enemy, angers his Lord and poisons his own life.

The action cure

The working remedy is to sentence envy to the opposite of everything it demands.

• If it pushes you to disparage the person — oblige your tongue to praise him.
• If it pushes you to arrogance over him — oblige yourself to humility before him, and to apologising to him.
• If it pushes you to withhold good from him — oblige yourself to increase your kindness to him.

Do this even as pure effort against the grain, and a circle starts to turn: when the envied man sees it, his heart warms and he loves you; when his love shows, you find yourself loving him back; and mutual affection cuts the very root that envy grows from. The forced becomes natural: humility, praise and shown pleasure at another's blessing win over the heart of the one blessed, draw his affection, move him to answer kindness with kindness — and what began as discipline ends as character.

And when Shaytan whispers — if you humble yourself and praise him, people will read it as weakness, as hypocrisy, as fear; this is humiliation — know it for his trickery and deceit. Graciousness, forced or natural, breaks the heat of enmity from both sides, and hearts recover from the pain of envy and the gloom of mutual hate. These medicines are extremely effective — and extremely bitter to the heart. But the benefit is in the bitter medicine: whoever cannot endure its bitterness will not taste the sweetness of the cure. What sweetens it is the strength of your knowledge of everything above, and desire for the reward of being pleased with Allah's decree — and the soul's own dignity: to be forever wanting what does not happen is humiliation, and there are only two exits from that humiliation:

Either what you want happens — or you learn to want what happens. The first is not in your hands, and no striving can deliver it. The second can be trained; struggle has a door into it, and practice makes it real. So every sane person must work on the second.

The specific cure: pull up the roots

That is the universal medicine. The targeted medicine is to hunt down envy's particular causes in yourself — arrogance, self-importance, greed for what does not benefit, and the rest — and treat each at its source, for these are the disease's supply lines, and a disease is not extinguished while its material remains. Without that, everything above only sedates and soothes; the envy returns, again and again, and the labour of calming it drags on while its roots stay watered. As long as a man loves position, he must envy whoever takes the position and the place in people's hearts that he wanted — the most he achieves is to soften the grief and keep it from his tongue and his hand; emptying the heart of it entirely is not possible while the root remains. And Allah is the giver of success.