Tradition

رَدُّ الْمَعْتادِ عَنْ عادَتِهِ كَالْمُعْجِزْ

Imam Hasan al-’Askari (‘a) is narrated to have said: “Breaking people’s incorrect habits is something like a miracle.”1

Brief Commentary

Habits are actually one of the great divine blessings because it makes difficult things easy to do for people. Many of the complex and difficult tasks which we must do in our day to day lives (such as speaking, walking, etc…) are made automatic through their habitual nature. At the same time, habits can also establish incorrect actions and make them automatic in nature as well. When negative behavior becomes enshrined in habit, it becomes very dangerous and eliminating it from our lives is transformed into a very difficult task. Imam ‘Askari (‘a) has considered the breaking of such habits to be similar in nature to a miracle. Therefore, we should strive not to cultivate negative habits to begin with and this will make it unnecessary for us to spend great amounts of time breaking them later on in our lives.

• 1. Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 17, p. 217.