The famous line about envy, and why it is not in this course

There is one sentence that appears in nearly every Muslim article on comparison. It says that envy devours good deeds the way fire devours fuel.

We are not citing it, and it is worth saying why out loud rather than dropping it quietly. It is narrated in Sunan Abi Dawud, and on sunnah.com al-Albani grades it weak. It is probably the single most circulated line in Muslim writing on this topic, and it is not sound.

That matters more here than it usually would, because of the job it gets given. It gets said to a fifteen year old who feels flat after looking at her friend's photographs, and what it tells her is that an ordinary feeling has been eating her deeds. That is a very heavy thing to load onto somebody on a weak chain.