The Medicine for Envy

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
In the Name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Compassionate

Assalaamu alaykum

Imam Al-Ghazali (may Allah have mercy on him) said in his book (Al-Ihya') after a number of pages on envy and its dangers, "Be aware that envy is one of the most dangerous diseases of the hearts, and there is no medicine for the diseases of the heart except with knowledge and deeds.

As to the knowledge that treats the disease of envy is to know without any doubt that envy is dangerous for you in this worldly life and in your deen, and there is no danger from it on the envied person in this life nor in his deen, on the contrary, the envied person will benefit from it.

The fact is envy is dangerous for your deen because with envy, you hated Allah's predestination and hated his blessings that He divided among his servants, and you hated His justice that He established in His world for a wisdom, so you contested that and objected it, and this is against the true oneness and belief. In addition to that, you would have shared with Iblees and the rest of the non-believers with their love for the crises to fall upon the believers and for the blessings to go away from them. These are evils in the heart that eat up the good deeds and erase them like the night erase the day.

And the fact that envy is dangerous upon your worldly life is that because you suffer from your envy in this life and you are tortured by it, and you will always be in sorrows every time you see the blessing of Allah on the envied person."

And as to the deeds that would treat envy, you should control yourself, so everything that you did in the process of your envy for someone else like any saying or action, you should now strive to do the opposite; if envy had driven you to say something bad about your envied person, then strive to make your tongue complement him, and if it had driven you to look down upon him, then act with humility and apologize to him, and if it had driven you to stop doing good things for the envied person, you should push yourself to do good things for him.

Then, Imam Al-Ghazali said: "These are the medicines for envy, and they are very effective, but they are bitter on the hearts, but the effectiveness is in the bitter medicine, so whosoever cannot be patient with the bitterness of medicine cannot get the sweetness of the cure."

May Allah cure all the diseases in our hearts, and remove all our blameworthy traits and replace them with praiseworthy traits. Ameen.

Allahumma salli 'ala Muhammad wa 'ala aalihi wa sahbihi wasallam.

And Allah knows best and He alone grants success.

Wassalaam