by Your mercy I seek help. Set all my affairs right, and do not leave me to myself even for the blink of an eye, nor to any of Your creatures.”

The servant thus lies between Allah and his enemy Iblīs. If Allah takes him into His care, his enemy cannot overcome him. But if He forsakes him and turns away from him, Satan devours him as a wolf devours a sheep.

If it is asked, “What fault has the sheep committed if the shepherd leaves it exposed to the wolf? Can it possibly overpower the wolf and escape?”

The answer is: By the life of Allah, Satan is indeed man’s wolf, as the truthful and trustworthy Prophet said. Yet Allah has given this accursed wolf no power over this sheep, despite its weakness. But if it surrenders itself, makes peace with the wolf, responds when he calls, obeys his command without holding back, and instead hurries obediently towards him—leaving the shepherd’s protected pasture, which wolves cannot enter, and entering the wolves’ territory, where anyone who enters becomes their prey—then who is the true wolf if not the sheep itself? How much more so when the shepherd warns it, makes it fear the danger, and puts it on its guard? He has even shown it the places where sheep that strayed from the shepherd and entered the valley of wolves met their end.

Ahmad ibn Marwān al-Mālikī said in his book al-Majālasa:

I heard Ibn Abī al-Dunyā say: Allah, glorified is He, possesses countless kinds of knowledge. He grants each person some of it that He does not grant another. Abū ʿAbd Allāh Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Saʿīd al-Qattān narrated to us: ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Bakr al-Sahmī narrated to us, from his father, that some people were travelling. Among them was a man who, whenever he passed a bird, would ask, “Do you know what these birds are saying?” They would answer, “No.” He would say, “They are saying such-and-such,” thus telling us something about which we could not know whether he was truthful or lying.

Eventually, they passed a flock of sheep. Among them was a ewe that had stayed behind with her lamb. She was bending her neck towards it and calling out. He asked, “Do you know what this ewe is saying?” We answered, “No.” He said, “She is telling her lamb: ‘Catch up, lest the wolf eat you as it ate your brother last year in this very place.’”

He continued: We reached the shepherd and asked him, “Did this ewe give birth before this year