“There is a man I cannot stand and I cannot get away from him.”
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
- Bearing the person who irritates you Monthly + moments
- Find him seventy excuses Under a minute, at the moment it happens
- Assuming the good opinion 15 min once
- Making dua for someone else Two minutes a day
- Serving without being seen Monthly + weekly
Where the first one comes from
Al-Tirmidhi and Ibn Maja narrate that the believer who mixes with people and bears their harm is greater in reward than the believer who does not mix with people and does not bear their harm. The Qur’an describes repelling with what is better, so that the one between whom and you there was enmity becomes like a close friend (Fussilat 41:34), and praises those who restrain rage and pardon people (Al ‘Imran 3:134). Ghazali, in Book 15 of the Ihya’, makes bearing a companion’s faults one of the duties of brotherhood rather than a favour done to him.
The full instructions — every step, what may change, the honest note, and the shariah note — are in the book, along with all 120 practices in order and the complete Index by Problem.
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