The 365 · Tazkiyah · Day 78 · Despair
Tarakkuz ʿalā al-Fashal · The Disease of Looking-Only-at-Failure
The disease
التَّرَكُّز عَلَى الْفَشَل
Tarakkuz ʿalā al-Fashal
The story
The classical scholars wrote at length on muḥāsabah (self-accounting) as the cure for tarakkuz ʿalā al-fashal. The discipline is balanced accounting: every evening, list both the day's good deeds and the day's bad deeds. The Companions practiced this. ʿUmar said: 'Hold yourselves accountable before you are held accountable; weigh your deeds before they are weighed.' The discipline produces a realistic picture: most days, the believer has done some good and some bad; the ledger is mixed; the despair is unjustified by the actual data.
Why it's named first
Tarakkuz ʿalā al-fashal is the cognitive habit of focusing on one's failures while ignoring one's successes. The diseased soul reviews its life and sees only the missed prayers, the lapses in fasting, the angry words, the failed projects, the broken commitments. The successes are structurally invisible. The lopsided ledger produces despair as a consequence of biased accounting. The cure is not to deny the failures, but to insist on a balanced ledger.
In the Qur'an
Q 11:114: وَأَقِمِ الصَّلَاةَ طَرَفَيِ النَّهَارِ وَزُلَفًا مِّنَ اللَّيْلِ ۚ إِنَّ الْحَسَنَاتِ يُذْهِبْنَ السَّيِّئَاتِ. Abdel Haleem: 'Keep up the prayer at both ends of the day, and during parts of the night, good deeds drive away bad ones...' The verse names the structural principle: good deeds erase bad deeds. The believer's ledger is therefore not just sins-accumulated; it is sins-minus-erasures.
In the Sunnah
The Prophet ﷺ said: 'Follow up a bad deed with a good deed and it will erase it; and treat people with good character.' (Tirmidhī 1987, classed ḥasan, narrated by Abū Dharr.) Cross-ref the broader hadith: 'Every good deed is multiplied ten-fold to seven-hundred-fold; every bad deed is recorded as a single deed unless Allah forgives it.' (Muslim 129.)
The cure
1. Practice daily muḥāsabah with both columns: good deeds and bad deeds. Most days will show some of each. 2. When despair-thoughts arise, deliberately list five good deeds you have done in the past week. The list breaks the bias. 3. Recite Q 11:114 daily; the verse's verbal acknowledgment that good deeds erase bad deeds reframes the cognitive ledger. 4. Visit those who do less than you (in worship, in giving). The exposure recalibrates the ledger comparatively.
What is at stake
Tarakkuz ʿalā al-fashal produces yaʾs (Day 76) and qunūṭ (Day 77) as downstream effects. The biased accounting is the cognitive engine of the despair diseases. The cure must address the cognitive root, not just the emotional symptom.
A du'a for this day
رَبَّنَا ظَلَمْنَا أَنفُسَنَا وَإِن لَّمْ تَغْفِرْ لَنَا وَتَرْحَمْنَا لَنَكُونَنَّ مِنَ الْخَاسِرِينَ (Q 7:23, Adam's repentance-duʿāʾ): 'Our Lord, we have wronged ourselves; if You do not forgive us and have mercy on us, we will surely be among the losers.' The duʿāʾ pairs honest admission of wrong with explicit hope in mercy.
The door of mercy
The cure is the discipline of balanced accounting. Each evening's two-column muḥāsabah retrains the soul's bias. Within forty days of practice, the soul's default account becomes balanced. The despair has no fuel when the ledger is read accurately.
A reflection to carry
Tarakkuz ʿalā al-fashal is the disease of looking only at failure: the heart's selective attention to one's failures while filtering out successes. The diseased state distorts the actual ledger of one's life.
Read the longer reflection
The believer in this state may have made hundreds of acts of obedience and dozens of failures; the diseased attention-pattern only registers the failures. The cure: structural balance-restoration. Each evening, name three good deeds you did today alongside any failures; the recording resets the attention. The Companions modeled this: even when conscious of their faults, they did not fall into despair-by-fault-fixation; they recorded both faults (for tawbah) and good (for shukr) in the same accounting. Modern depression-prone believers especially benefit from this structural balance-discipline.
Sources: Quran, Sahih Muslim, Tirmidhi. The Qur'an and its translation are verified; the scholarship is retold faithfully in our own words and credited to its sources, never reproduced verbatim.
A verse, a healing, and a Sunnah, every morning.
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