Riya (Ostentation)

A hadith transmitted widely enough to appear across several major collections has the Prophet warning his companions of what he most fears for them, not open disbelief but al shirk al asghar, the lesser associating of another with God, and when asked what that is, answering riya, naming the vice in terms drawn from the gravest category of theological error in Islam, shirk, associating a partner with God's uniqueness, while carefully qualifying it as the lesser, hidden form rather than the greater.

Ghazali's Ihya devotes sustained attention to riya precisely because of this classification, arguing that the vice is dangerous in proportion to how easily it hides even from the person committing it, since a worshipper can perform every outward element of prayer, fasting or charity correctly while directing the act, in some fraction of intention too subtle to notice without deliberate self examination, toward human witnesses rather than toward God, an act that satisfies its outward form while forfeiting the spiritual reward the tradition holds sincerity alone secures. The Quran addresses the same failing directly in its description of the hypocrites, who are said to stand for prayer lazily, showing off before people, language later exegesis reads as describing not merely reluctant worship but worship performed with an eye toward an audience rather than toward God.

A hadith recorded in Sahih Muslim describes three people brought to account on the Day of Judgement whose apparently pious works, martyrdom, scholarship and generous spending, are rejected specifically because each is found to have acted so that people would say of him he was brave, he was learned, or he was generous, and each is told that they were indeed called so, and so have already received in this life the only reward their intention was actually directed toward; Ghazali cites this narration as the starkest possible statement of riya's cost, that even the most outwardly impressive religious acts, up to and including dying in battle, can be entirely voided of reward by an intention aimed at human regard rather than at God. His practical guidance distinguishes several grades of the vice by severity, from performing an act purely for show, which nullifies it outright, down to a lesser case in which someone performs an act sincerely for God but feels pleased when others happen to notice it, a case akhlaq scholars treat more leniently, arguing that being pleased by praise one did not seek is a weaker fault than seeking it, though still worth guarding against through the specific discipline of ikhlas, sincerity, the virtue this vice is most directly opposed to.