Ghadab (Wrath)

Sahih al Bukhari records a man asking the Prophet for advice and, receiving the answer do not become angry, repeating the request several times hoping for a fuller counsel, only to be given the same single instruction each time, a report akhlaq scholars cite as evidence that ghadab was judged sufficiently central to right conduct that restraining it could stand in, on its own, for an entire programme of ethical instruction.

Ghazali's treatment in the Ihya locates the danger in anger's specific effect on judgement, describing it as a fire that, once kindled, can overwhelm the intellect's capacity to restrain the tongue and the limbs, producing speech and action a person would not have chosen in a calmer state and often regrets once the state has passed, which is why his prescribed remedies focus less on suppressing an angry feeling once it has already arisen, judged too late to be reliably effective, than on removing its habitual causes beforehand, correcting the pride, kibr, and excessive attachment to one's own status that akhlaq literature treats as anger's usual root. The tradition distinguishes this excessive ghadab sharply from a measured anger at genuine wrongdoing, which several scholars including Ghazali treat as a natural and even necessary faculty when it remains proportionate and directed by reason rather than seizing control of it.

Hadith literature attributes to the Prophet a set of specific, practical instructions for a person overtaken by anger that later akhlaq writers treat as a graduated programme rather than a single remedy: if angry while standing, sit down, and if the anger persists even sitting, lie down, a sequence understood as progressively reducing the physical posture available to aggressive action; a separate hadith recommends performing ablution, wudu, on the reasoning, attributed in some transmissions to the Prophet himself, that anger is a live coal from Satan kindled in the heart and water extinguishes fire.

Ghazali reads these instructions as consistent with his broader therapeutic method across the vices, addressing a spiritual state through concrete, repeatable bodily practice rather than through willpower exercised in the moment of provocation alone, since he holds that a mind already overtaken by ghadab has temporarily lost the capacity for the kind of reasoned self correction moral advice alone would require. Sabr, patience or forbearance, is presented across this literature as ghadab's specific and named contrary virtue, the disposition cultivated in advance that reduces how often and how forcefully anger arises in the first place, making the pairing of the two among the most consistently stated opposed terms in the entire akhlaq tradition.