“I am on my phone more than I am anywhere else.”

If this is your sentence tonight, you are not the first to say it — and you are not being told anything is wrong with your iman. The tradition wrote down, in detail, what a person does about exactly this: not the theory of it, the treatment of it. Named masters, named books, numbered steps, and how long each one takes.

Two rules before any practice, and they are the tradition’s rules, not ours. First: one practice at a time, kept for two weeks, before you consider a second — the rush is the problem, not the cure. Second: do the practice and leave the result alone. Do not take your own spiritual temperature afterwards; the checking is itself a turning away.

The practices the book sends you to

• The phone fast One to two hours a day
  A fixed block of hours each day with the device off and out of the room. — Section 7 — Silence and Khalwa
• Dhikr in the ten minutes before sleep 7–10 minutes
  The last words of the day, in a fixed order, with the phone out of reach. — Section 2 — Dhikr
• The drive home in silence 15–25 minutes, five days a week
  Twenty minutes of the commute with nothing playing, five days a week. — Section 7 — Silence and Khalwa
• The hour alone One hour, once a week
  One hour a week, by yourself, with nothing in it to do. — Section 7 — Silence and Khalwa
• Removing the occasion, not fighting the desire One evening to set up
  Cut the road that leads to it. Do not stand on the road and test yourself. — Section 4 — The Nafs

Where the first one comes from

There is no classical text on phones. What the tradition does treat is the traffic into the heart: Ghazali, in Book 21 of the Ihya’, The Marvels of the Heart, describes the senses as the roads by which the world arrives at the heart, and gives Book 24 to the faults of the tongue, of which idle talk is the ordinary daily leak. Al-Tirmidhi and Ibn Maja narrate that part of a person’s good Islam is leaving what does not concern him. Ibn al-Jawzi returns again and again in Sayd al-Khatir to the value of one’s hours and how quietly they drain.

Other sentences

• “I cannot stop looking at things I should not look at.”
• “I have a sin I have quietly decided is just how I am.”
• “The adhan goes and everything in me refuses.”