Sleepless nights often arrive carrying more than fatigue. They bring with them the weight of unresolved thoughts—of injustice replayed again and again inside the mind, of conversations imagined but never spoken, of answers that did not arrive when they were most needed. In those hours, when the world feels unfair and unlistening, anger begins to present itself as relief. It promises strength, clarity and action but anger, for all its urgency, is a fragile companion.
What it offers at first as power soon begins to narrow the moral imagination. It reduces complex realities into sharp binaries and replaces listening with reaction. Under its influence, everything becomes immediate, and nothing is allowed to unfold. Anger moves fast, but it does not move deep.
In places shaped by long histories of waiting—waiting for justice, for acknowledgment, for peace—anger often feels justified, even necessary. Yet living within anger carries cost. It exhausts the spirit. It hardens the heart. Over time, it begins to resemble the very forces it claims to oppose.
Spiritual traditions across cultures have long warned of this erosion. In Islamic teaching, anger is not denied or dismissed; it is recognised as human. But it is also treated as something that must be restrained before it begins to rule. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), when repeatedly asked for advice, responded with the same words: “Do not become angry.” He did not say injustice should be ignored, nor did he suggest silence in the face of wrongdoing. What he cautioned against was the surrender of the self to rage.
Anger cannot sit still long enough to hear God.
Listening—true listening—requires surrender. Not surrender in the sense of helplessness, but in trust. Trust that events unfold within a larger moral order, even when that order feels obscured. Trust that accountability is not erased simply because it is delayed. Trust that restraint does not weaken justice; it preserves it.
Surrender, in this sense, is not passivity. It is discipline.
Sufi traditions speak often of sabr—patience not as endurance alone, but as an active spiritual posture. Patience is not waiting without pain; it is waiting without allowing pain to deform the soul. Anger seeks immediacy. It demands response, recognition, resolution—now. Justice, however, works differently. Justice requires endurance. It moves slowly, sometimes unbearably so. But it asks for steadiness rather than speed.
And this is where restraint becomes strength.
Restraint is not silence born of fear; it is silence chosen with intention. Silence, here, is labour. It requires holding back words that may wound more deeply than weapons, resisting the temptation to speak simply to release pressure. In restrained silence, one does not deny anger’s presence—but refuses to let it decide the terms of engagement.
The soul weakens not because it feels anger, but because it dwells within it for too long.
Anger shrinks the inner world until little remains beyond grievance. It robs prayer of stillness and reflection of depth. Over time, it ceases to be a response and becomes a way of being.
In choosing restraint, there is no guarantee of immediate relief. But there is preservation—of dignity, of clarity, of the soul’s capacity to remain open rather than hardened.
Anger wants the world to move faster. Faith asks the heart to remain steady.
And in that steadiness—difficult, costly, often lonely—the soul learns not to weaken, but to endure.