“I have found a man who says he is a shaykh, and something is wrong.”

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 warning signs of a false one Six to twelve months, in the background
  Seven checks a man can actually run, and what to do when one of them fails. — Section 0 — Seeking a Guide
• What a true guide looks like A year of ordinary attendance
  Observable checks you run on a man over a year, not a list of qualities you admire. — Section 0 — Seeking a Guide
• Sincerity in the asking Ten minutes once, five minutes a month after
  Writing down what you actually want from a teacher, including the parts you would rather not see. — Section 0 — Seeking a Guide
• Trusting the timing Five minutes when needed; two minutes weekly
  Istikhara before real steps, and a weekly two minutes of naming what you did not arrange. — Section 0 — Seeking a Guide
• Never arguing about religion 10 sec each time
  Leaving the argument even when you are right, with the exit lines written in advance. — Section 10 — Adab With People

Where the first one comes from

Al-Qushayri opens al-Risala al-Qushayriyya by lamenting that in his own century the name of this path had survived while the reality had gone, and that men were claiming states they did not possess. That was the fifth Islamic century; it has not improved. Ghazali’s account of the worldly scholars in Book 1 of the Ihya’ is a portrait of the same man, and Ibn al-Jawzi wrote a whole book on the deceptions of Iblis, much of which concerns those who wear the clothes of renunciation over an empty inside.

Other sentences

• “I am jealous of a man I have to see every week.”
• “There is a man I cannot stand and I cannot get away from him.”
• “I talk about people. I know I am doing it and I do it anyway.”