IHSAN · THE BEAUTIFUL DOING
Twelve essays on Islamic contemplative traditions — beginning with a standard that does not depend on the result or on who is watching.
Most people are handed two ways of assessing what they did. Did it work, and did you try hard.
Both fail on ordinary days. The first is settled by things outside you and is often unavailable. The second is a measure of expenditure rather than of anything produced, and it rewards the person who did a mediocre thing effortfully.
Ihsan is the third: doing the thing well, as a standard, independent of the outcome and independent of observation. Its test is disarmingly simple. What happens to the quality of your work when there is nobody to see it and no result riding on it?
Imagine someone running the test on their handwriting. Not anything that matters: the notes they keep for themselves, that nobody else will ever read. They had assumed those were fine. They are, for the first two lines of any page. After that they stop being writing and become a record of the fact that the person was present.
Tasawwuf — the word usually rendered Sufism in English — is not a free-floating spirituality that happens to have arisen in Muslim countries. It is a set of contemplative traditions within Islam, developed by people for whom the Quran, the prophetic example and the law were the ground everything else stood on. It is practised now, by Muslims, in orders with living teachers.
The standard English mishandling is to remove that. It is not subtle: Coleman Barks, whose versions of Rumi have sold in the millions and are the way most English readers have met this material, does not read Persian, calls his work versions rather than translations, and has said in as many words that he took the Islam out of it. The result is a poet presented as a universal mystic who was in fact a professor of Islamic law.
I am outside the religion. This collection does not claim otherwise, uses scholarly translations, and says at each point where it is taking something and leaving the frame it belonged to. The closing essay makes that accounting in full.
There is also a debt to declare. Sufi terms have appeared across this library already — hal and maqam in the Not-Two collection, dhikr and muhasaba in Still Water, the camel in Mussar. I have been borrowing from this tradition for some time without giving it a collection of its own, and this is that collection.
This is a central and soundly transmitted text, not a marginal saying, and the definition it gives is the one the tradition built on.
What travels out of it, for somebody who is not going to adopt the theology, is the structure rather than the content: a standard of quality located neither in the result nor in the effort, and specifically not dependent on an audience. The tradition grounds that in being seen by God. I cannot borrow the ground, and I can notice what the structure does.
A man arrives at a gathering, unknown to anybody, in brilliantly white clothes and showing no sign of travel. He sits close and questions the Prophet: what is islam, what is iman, what is ihsan.
Each answer is given, and the stranger says that each is right — which is strange, since a questioner does not usually rule on the answers. He leaves, and the Prophet tells the company that this was Gabriel, come to teach them their religion.
The detail worth sitting with is the sequence. Ihsan is third, after submission and faith, and it is the summit rather than the entrance. The tradition placed its highest standard in a scene about being examined by somebody you did not know was examining you, which is a better teaching device than any definition.
The nearest empirical thing is the literature on practice quality rather than quantity: the claim that what distinguishes expert development is the structure of the work — specific goals, immediate feedback, attention at the edge of ability, correction rather than comfortable repetition.4 That framework is itself contested. Macnamara and colleagues’ meta-analyses found deliberate practice accounting for a much smaller share of variance than the original claim, and varying widely by domain.5
The relevant finding is about supervision. Self-regulated practice quality varies widely between individuals and is associated with development more strongly than total volume is.6 That work is correlational and cross-sectional rather than experimental, which matters: better athletes may simply practise more carefully, rather than careful practice producing better athletes.
What this does not do is support the tradition’s claim. The research is about skill acquisition and says nothing about doing a thing beautifully for its own sake, which is not a variable anybody has measured. Two accounts pointing in a similar direction is not one confirming the other, and this library has been strict about that.
The objection is about what an unbounded quality standard does to a person.
The case against
Outcome and effort are both bounded — you won or you did not, you worked or you did not. A quality standard is continuous, and for somebody already inclined toward perfectionism it supplies an inexhaustible reason that nothing was good enough.
The tradition has a partial answer in that the standard is relational rather than competitive — the point is the manner of the doing, not an ever-receding grade. But it did not have to contend with a culture that turns every standard into a metric, and the popular version of this idea travels straight into optimization.
The guard I would use: ihsan is assessed on one repetition, not on a career. If the standard is producing a verdict about you rather than a description of a rep, it has become something else.
Pick one small recurring thing that nobody checks. Not the visible work — the part that would pass unnoticed if done adequately. The handwriting, the warm-up, the email nobody will reread.
Do it to the standard once, deliberately, and notice what that required. It is usually attention rather than time, and the thing generally takes about as long either way, which is the useful discovery.
Then run the test honestly across a week: where does your quality drop when nobody is counting? The pattern is specific and it is information about what you are actually doing the work for.
And keep the scale at one repetition. Not the day, not the season. The moment the standard applies to a career it becomes the failure above.
Installed small and grown outward, which is the tradition’s own order.
Outcome is often unavailable and effort rewards the wrong thing. A standard of quality is the only one of the three that is entirely in your hands and does not require the day to have gone well.
The tradition grounds it in being seen. I cannot take that ground, and the structure survives without it: a standard that does not depend on an audience is the only kind that holds when there is not one.
And it belongs to a single repetition. Applied to a life it becomes an instrument for never being satisfied, which is not what the word means.
Find one small recurring thing nobody checks, and do it to the standard once a day. Notice what that required — usually attention rather than time.
Then run the test across a week: where does your quality drop when nothing rides on it? Keep the scale at one repetition; applied to a career it becomes something else.
Arabic and Persian terms are transliterated simply and without diacritics. Where a hadīth is of contested authenticity, or a story is later hagiography rather than record, the essay says so in the body. Rumi is quoted from scholarly translations rather than from the popular English versions, for reasons the closing essay sets out at length. Modern research is cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.