“I have been asking Allah for the same thing for nine years.”

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

• Persistence One minute a day, indefinitely
  Continuing to ask after the years in which nothing came. — Section 8 — Dua
• The three answers Five minutes once, then one minute a day
  What the tradition says becomes of a dua — and the part of it you are not permitted to know. — Section 8 — Dua
• What a delayed answer actually means Twenty minutes, once
  Reading a long silence without either denial or false comfort. — Section 8 — Dua
• Dua in sujood 30–60 seconds, once a day
  Asking at the point of the prayer where the reports place you closest. — Section 8 — Dua
• The dua of tahajjud 3–10 min
  What you actually say in the hour of descent — including nothing at all. — Section 5 — The Night

Where the first one comes from

Bukhari and Muslim narrate that the servant’s supplication is answered so long as he is not hasty; when asked what haste meant, the Prophet described the man who says he supplicated and supplicated and was not answered, and so despairs and abandons the dua. Muslim has a wording adding that the servant continues to be answered so long as he does not ask for sin or the severing of kinship. Ibn ’Ata’illah treats the same subject in al-Hikam, warning the seeker not to let the delay of the gift, despite persistence in asking, become a cause of despair.

Other sentences

• “I am angry with Allah.”
• “I am religious in public and hard to live with at home.”
• “I lose my temper, and the house goes quiet when I come in.”