Lesson 6 of 6 · When this is a safety matter
If one thing stays with you
Let it be this.
The signal is physical and it arrives before the words, so the body is the only early warning you are going to get. The window is short, and everything useful happens inside it or before it. And what the verse asks of you is not silence, it is that the anger does not get to choose what you do next, and then that you do something.
Al-Ghazali put the last part of that in a single clause, and it is the shortest form of it anywhere: He said, those who restrain rage, and He did not say, those who lack rage.
You are not being asked to become a person who does not feel this. You are being asked to notice it about two seconds earlier than you do now.
Qur’an and Sunnah
What the verse asks of you is not silence. It is that the anger does not get to choose what you do next, and then that you do something. As al-Ghazali puts it, He said those who restrain rage, and He did not say those who lack rage.
ٱلَّذِينَ يُنفِقُونَ فِي ٱلسَّرَّآءِ وَٱلضَّرَّآءِ وَٱلۡكَٰظِمِينَ ٱلۡغَيۡظَ وَٱلۡعَافِينَ عَنِ ٱلنَّاسِۗ وَٱللَّهُ يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُحۡسِنِينَ
who give, both in prosperity and adversity, who restrain their anger and pardon people- God loves those who do good
Qur’an 3:134
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.