September 13, 2026

Untangle Hope From Effort

It is one of the signs of relying on one's own deeds that hope diminishes when a downfall occurs.

Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari was a thirteenth-century Sufi master of the Shadhili order who taught and wrote in Alexandria and Cairo. This line opens his Kitab al-Hikam, a collection of short aphorisms meant to correct the spiritual traveler's reliance on the ego. He wrote it for students who measured their standing with God by the success or failure of their own works, and who despaired the moment those works faltered. The teaching still lands today because it separates effort from outcome, showing that hope collapses only when it was never truly surrendered in the first place.