Introduction

Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Taymiyyah was born in Ḥarrān in 661 AH (1263 CE) into a family of distinguished Ḥanbalī scholars. He completed his foundational studies in Damascus after his family fled the Mongol advance, and from an early age demonstrated exceptional command of Quranic exegesis, ḥadīth, and legal theory. By his mid-twenties he was issuing fatwas and engaging the leading scholars of his era. His life was marked by intellectual productivity amid repeated imprisonment: he spent years confined in the citadels of Cairo and Damascus for positions the political and religious establishments found inconvenient, yet his pen did not rest. Ibn Taymiyyah died in the Damascene citadel in 728 AH (1328 CE), leaving behind a corpus that would shape Sunni scholarship for centuries. Amrāḍ al-Qulūb wa Shifāʾuhā, the treatise translated here as Diseases of the Hearts and Their Cures, belongs to his extensive output on tazkiyat al-nafs, the purification of the soul, and was composed as a concise but penetrating guide to the interior life of the believer.

The book addresses the ailments of the heart identified in Quranic and prophetic discourse: envy (ḥasad), arrogance (kibr), ostentation (riyāʾ), love of the world (ḥubb al-dunyā), heedlessness (ghafla), and related states that corrupt the will and distance the servant from Allah. Ibn Taymiyyah does not treat these as abstract theological categories; he examines their causes, their symptoms in conduct and intention, and the practical remedies prescribed by revelation and confirmed by rational reflection. His methodology throughout is Atharī: the Quran and authentic Sunnah are the primary sources, the understanding of the Companions and early generations (al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ) is the interpretive guide, and speculative philosophy is held at arm's length. Where Sufi masters addressed the same diseases, Ibn Taymiyyah accepts what is grounded in scripture and corrects what is not, making this work both a critique and a constructive contribution to the literature of Islamic spirituality.

The treatise exerted considerable influence on subsequent scholars of the Ḥanbalī school and on the broader tradition of Islamic moral theology. Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn Taymiyyah's most distinguished student, built directly on these foundations in his own major works on the heart and its states, including Ighathat al-Lahfān and Madārij al-Sālikīn. Later reformist scholars across the Sunni world returned repeatedly to Ibn Taymiyyah's framing of spiritual corruption as something to be treated through the revealed texts rather than through inherited Sufi chains alone. The conciseness of this particular treatise, combined with the directness of its prescriptions, has made it accessible to readers who might find his larger theological works demanding, and it has been taught in circles of Islamic learning from Damascus to the Indian subcontinent and beyond.

A reader approaching this work benefits most from holding two commitments simultaneously: a willingness to examine one's own inner states honestly, and a patient return to the Quranic verses and prophetic reports that Ibn Taymiyyah cites as the foundation of every remedy he proposes. The book is not a manual of ascetic exercises but a guide to understanding; its cures are ultimately acts of worship, knowledge, and sustained remembrance of Allah. Students of Islamic theology will find in it a model of how ʿilm (knowledge) and ʿamal (practice) are held together in the Atharī tradition. General readers seeking to understand the Islamic approach to spiritual illness will find clear answers, grounded in classical sources, to questions that remain urgently relevant in every age.