A Child Who Learned to Tire Out Shayṭān

There is an account, from the childhood of a teacher now deceased (may Allah have mercy upon him), of a lesson learned at perhaps five or six years old, before he had even begun school. His mother had taught him about Shayṭān, and about driving him off with the refuge formula. One day, having climbed a fruit tree in the garden, he took to whistling — not, in itself, a commendable habit — stopping, and starting again. His mother came out and asked what he was doing. He told her he was tiring Shayṭān out. Asked how, he explained: each time he whistled, Shayṭān came to him; he would say the refuge formula, and Shayṭān would flee; then he would whistle again, and Shayṭān would return, and again he would send him away with the same words — back and forth, over and over — until, by a child's reasoning, Shayṭān would tire of it and give up.

Children today receive no such grounding: they are not taught who their enemy is, and are left largely to the mercy of their own nafs al-ammārah and Shayṭān, with the result treated as a mere developmental phase — a "teenage problem," now an industry of its own — although no such notion, under any name, appears anywhere in earlier Islamic history. Earlier generations were given, from a young age, a proper education in exactly this: who the enemy was, both within and without, and how to contend with it, renewed at every stage of upbringing. Very little of that remains today, and ideas of this kind can strike those unused to them as exotic, even implausible — a shrug of disbelief at the notion that a person carries something within as well as something without. Yet the nafs and Shayṭān are at work on precisely such a listener even as the disbelief forms, whether or not it is acknowledged; from the moment of puberty onward, every person is assigned a companion of this kind, as the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) states.