“From the evil of an envier when he envies”. Envy is a disapproved characteristic both constitutionally [in the human] and in the shari‘ah. The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said: “Al-Hasad eats up good deeds as the fire eats up firewood.”1 One of the men of knowledge2 said, “Al-Hasad is the first act by which Allah was disobeyed both in heaven and on the earth. As for in heaven, Iblis envied Adam, and as for in the earth, Qabil killed his brother, Habil3, because of envy.”
Moreover envy has degrees:
• the first is that a man should love to see the disappearance of a blessing which his brother Muslim has, even though it would not be transferred to him, rather he dislikes to see Allah blessing anyone else and suffers pain because of it;
• second, that he should love to see the disappearance of this blessing because of his own desire of it hoping that it would be transferred to him;
• third, that he should hope for himself the like of this blessing without wishing for the other to lose it, and this is acceptable and it is not really envy, but it is only ghibtah [of which the preceding words are the exact definition].
The envier harms himself in a threefold manner:
• one of which is that he acquires wrong actions since envy is forbidden;
• second, it is discourteous towards Allah, exalted is He, since the reality of envy is dislike of Allah’s blessing His slave and opposition to Allah in His act;
• third, the pain he inflicts on his own heart from the multitude of his worries and unhappiness. We desire passionately of Allah that He should make us envied and not enviers, since the envied is in good fortune and the envier is in distress and affliction. To Allah be attributed the good of the one who said:
“I have mercy on my enviers because of the excess
of what their breasts enclose of spite and rancour.
They saw what Allah had done with me
so their eyes were in a garden
and their hearts in a fire.”
Another said:
“If they envy me I do not blame them,
Before me the best people were envied.
So may it continue for me and for them what I have and they have,
and most of us die enraged because of what he finds.”
Moreover the envier will never give up his enmity and trying to befriend him will be of no benefit. He is a wrongdoer who complains as if he were wronged. Certainly the one who said the following was truthful:
“An end can be hoped for every enmity
except for the enmity of one who is your enemy out of envy.”
And the Sage of the Poets said:
“And the most unjust of Allah’s creatures is he who spends the night envious
of he who spends the night at ease in His blessings.”
Footnotes
1 Narrated by Abu Dawud as-Sijistani in his Sunan collection.
2 It is said that the person was Abu Sa‘id Hasan al-Basri, may Allah show mercy to him. He was of the successors and grew up by the side of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, may Allah ennoble his face. He was born in Madinah where he grew up and he died in Basra (d. 110 AH). He was given understanding of the deen. It is reported that he once said, “Hope and forgetfulness are two great blessings for Bani Adam. If it were not for them, the Muslims would not walk in the streets.”
3 The anglicised versions of these names are respectively Cain and Abel.