The Benefits

Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya did not sit down to write this book. He kept it. Over a lifetime of reading, teaching and examining himself, he set down whatever stopped him — a principle that opens a verse, a distinction that settles a difficulty, a word about the heart he had tested on himself before he wrote it. What we have is not a treatise but a physician's notebook, and its subject is the human soul. The benefits are short and do not build to a conclusion the way a treatise does: one on how to read the Qur'an so that it reaches the heart, one line on the two doors through which the forbidden enters, a long one on what the heart does when it is starved. Underneath every page runs one certainty — that the heart has a condition, that its condition can be known, and that it can change. This edition sets the text in 47 chapters, each closing with a Key Point in the author's own words and one practice to carry into the day, with a reading companion and a glossary.