Why are so many of us, in a community that possesses the truth, so quietly unwell?

We pray on time, fast for a month, pay Zakat, and give Sadaqah. And still there is the anxiety, the exhaustion, the anger that comes out sideways at the people we love most, the envy we would never admit to. And underneath it, the suspicion that something is not working, that it is probably our own fault, and that we had better not say so out loud.

If you are depressed, your faith is weak. If you are anxious, you lack trust in Allah. If you are struggling, pray more.

That is not our religion.

Islam has an extraordinary science of the heart, one of the great achievements of this civilisation, and we have very largely lost it. Al-Ghazali, Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Balkhi and Ibn al-Jawzi examined envy, despair, rumination and self-deception with a precision and a compassion that has never been matched. Their hospitals treated the mentally ill as patients while much of the world was driving such people out of villages.

The Sound Heart puts that inheritance back in your hands. Thirty-six chapters, grounded in the Qur’an and the Sunnah, that name what is wrong and then tell you exactly what to do about it. On greed and anger and pride. On the mind that will not settle and the dark that will not lift. On sleep, the phone, the table, your marriage, your work. On seeking professional help and why doing so is an act of faith rather than a failure of it.

Every diagnosis in this book exists for the sake of a cure. And the cure is real, it is available tonight, and the One who prescribed it loved you first.