Before you read on

Read this before you start. If someone in your home is frightened of you, or has changed how they behave to keep you calm, or if you have hurt a person or broken something in anger, then this is a safety matter and not a self help matter. Carrying on with an anger course is itself a risk in that situation. Get specialist help, and go to the course Recognising harm at home instead of this one. Nothing here may be used to justify frightening, threatening or striking anyone, in any relationship, and no ruling permitting any of that is given or implied on this platform. Where a fiqh question comes up in the lessons you will be sent to a qualified mufti rather than to a search engine.

Lesson 3 of 6

Two opposite mistakes

The first mistake says anger is always from Shaytan, so if you are angry you have let him in. That takes a normal human state, one that prophets are described as having, and turns it into evidence of a spiritual fault. It adds shame to a situation in which shame is already one of the drivers.

The second mistake goes the other way. It says anger is honesty, that holding it in is fake, and that whatever comes out in the heat of it is the truth finally arriving.

The tradition does not say either of these. It treats anger as a faculty, something that has a proper use and that goes wrong by excess and also by being absent altogether. What is being trained is not the feeling. It is what the feeling is allowed to do.

Kazm al ghayz is not silence · Inshirah