Istidrāj

Istidraj is one of the most fearful concepts in al-Ghazali's spiritual vocabulary — the divine phenomenon in which a sinner is granted increasing blessings, health, and worldly ease precisely because God has abandoned them to their heedlessness. The person who should have repented long ago instead interprets their comfortable life as a sign of divine approval, while in reality the rope is being lengthened before the fall. Al-Ghazali cites the Quranic warning: 'We shall lead them on step by step from where they do not know.' Understanding istidraj is meant to break the complacency of the person who delays repentance because 'nothing bad has happened yet' — nothing bad yet is, for some, the most terrifying sign of all.

As understood in the classical tradition of Imam al-Ghazali and the scholars of his school.