“Whoever busies himself with people’s faults instead of his own, his heart goes blind, his body tires, and leaving his own faults becomes impossible for him.”

Ibn Hibban al-Busti (d. 354 AH / 965 CE), the hadith master, wrote Rawdat al-‘Uqala’ as a manual of good conduct, and this sentence mirrors the one just before it: whoever busies himself with his own faults rather than other people’s rests his body and spares his heart, and every fault he finds in himself makes the same fault in his brother easier to bear. This card used to carry al-Ghazali’s name; the sentence was not found in his Ihya’, and Ibn Hibban’s, written some 150 years earlier, is the one on record.