8:53 “That is because Allah would never change a blessing He had bestowed upon a people until they change what is in themselves.”
Whoever reflects on the accounts Allah relates in His Book of the nations from whom He withdrew His blessings will find that the cause in every case was disobeying His commands and defying His messengers.
Likewise, whoever considers the circumstances of his contemporaries and the blessings Allah has withdrawn from them will find that all this stems from the evil consequences of sins. As the saying goes:
When you enjoy a blessing, guard it well,
For sins cause blessings to depart.
Nothing has ever preserved Allah’s blessings like obedience to Him, nor increased them like gratitude to Him. Nothing strips a servant of a blessing like disobedience to his Lord. Disobedience is a fire that consumes blessings, acting upon them as fire acts upon dry wood. Whoever reflects widely on the affairs of the world has no need for anyone else to explain this to him.
The point is that these causes are unquestionably evils.
Their consequences are also evils because they are pains of the soul and body. Alongside intense physical pain, the sufferer endures the soul’s pain of worry, distress, sorrow, and regret. If an intelligent, discerning person truly recognized this, he would exercise the caution it deserves and strive earnestly to escape it. Yet a veil of heedlessness has been cast over his heart, so that Allah may accomplish a matter already decreed. Were he truly to awaken, his soul would be torn apart in this world by regret over the share of blessings from Allah he has missed, both in this life and in the Hereafter. This will only become fully apparent to him when he departs this world and looks upon the world of everlasting life. Then he will say:
89:24 “Oh, I wish I had sent ahead some good for my life!”
and 39:56 “Oh, how I regret my neglect of my duty to Allah!”
Since evil consists of pains and their causes, all the Prophet’s ﷺ supplications for refuge revolve around these two fundamentals. Everything from which he sought refuge, or instructed others to seek refuge, is either