Envyishumannature—sodisciplineit

A gentler verdict

Ibn al-Jawzi opens this reflection in Ṣayd al-Khāṭir (1/430) with an honesty that is rare in books of admonition. He writes: I saw people condemning the envier and going to extremes, saying none envies but a wicked man who hates Allah’s blessing, resents His decree, and begrudges his Muslim brother. So I looked into the matter, and I did not find it as they say.

The truth, he says, is this: no human being likes to be surpassed. When a man sees his friend rise above him, it stings; he wishes his friend had not attained it, or that he himself could attain the same, so as not to be left below. It is kneaded into the very clay we are made of, and there is no blame in it; the blame is only in acting on it, in word or in deed.

Ibn al-Jawzi thought this insight was his own discovery, until he found that al-Hasan al-Basri had said it before him. He cites, with his chain of narration, al-Hasan’s words: “There is no child of Adam except that envy was created along with him.”

Living wisely among people

From that realistic starting point, Ibn al-Jawzi draws practical counsel, not a retreat from people but a wise measure in dealing with them:

• Keep company in measure. A degree of withdrawal from people is a cause of a sweet life; mix, but with moderation.
• Handle an enemy with care, treating him courteously and warily, for he may scheme against you and destroy you.
• Do good to the one who wrongs you.
• Use discretion in your affairs; concealment is a helper to their success.
• Let people be acquaintances, not intimates.

The rarest thing in the world is a true friend, because a friend must be a peer, and there lies the problem: if you befriend someone far beneath your level you gain nothing from his company; and if you befriend a peer or near-peer, he will envy you. If you are alert, you will glimpse it in his words and his actions:

…وَلَتَعْرِفَنَّهُمْ فِى لَحْنِ ٱلْقَوْلِ…

wa la-ta'rifannahum fī laḥni l-qawl

"…But you will surely know them by the tone of [their] speech."

• Keep your distance from a known envier; he sees your blessing, and may strike it with his eye. If you must mix with him, share no secret with him, seek no counsel from him, and do not be taken in by his flattery, nor by the piety and devotion he displays, for envy overcomes religion. His proofs: envy drove Qabil to murder his brother; envy made Yusuf’s brothers sell him for a paltry price; and Abu Amir the monk was a devoted, intelligent worshipper, and Abdullah ibn Ubayy a chieftain, yet envy of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ drove them both to hypocrisy and away from the truth.

Your envier is already being punished

Do not seek any punishment for your envier beyond what he already suffers, for he is locked in an enormous, continuous torment: nothing will satisfy him but the removal of your blessing, and the longer your blessing lasts, the longer his suffering stretches. He has no life worth the name. Even the bliss of the people of Paradise was not sweet, Ibn al-Jawzi observes, until envy and rancour were pulled out of their breasts; had it remained, they would have envied one another and soured their own delight. So for whoever keeps his envy from crossing into word or deed, nothing further pursues him.

Iblis and Adam

When Adam’s virtues were displayed before creation (the angels prostrating to him, his teaching them the names of all things while they listened like students before a master, until they confessed their inability, and his being settled with his wife in the Garden), Iblis’s envy broke into the open, and he set to work harming him. And so it has remained: excellence, once it appears, is envied. 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.

Iblis schemed against Adam until he caused his departure from the Garden. But the fool did not understand: by leaving it, Adam’s virtues were completed, and he will return to the Garden in a state better than his first. What destroyed Iblis was conceit in himself, “I am better than him”, while Adam’s virtues were perfected by his confession against himself: “Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves” (al-A‘rāf 7:23).

Every time Iblis lit the fire of envy against Adam, the fragrance of Adam spread from it, and Iblis himself burned. Ibn al-Jawzi closes with the couplet:

When Allah wills a hidden virtue spread,
He grants it the tongue of an envier.
Had fire not seized what lay beside it,
the scent of the oud would never be known.

The pang you feel when a friend rises came with the clay and is no verdict on your faith. The test is what you do next. Hold your tongue and your hand, and turn the sting into du‘ā for the one who rose.