“I have no one to teach me and I do not know how to find anyone.”

If this is your sentence tonight, you are not the first to say it — and you are not being told anything is wrong with your iman. The tradition wrote down, in detail, what a person does about exactly this: not the theory of it, the treatment of it. Named masters, named books, numbered steps, and how long each one takes.

Two rules before any practice, and they are the tradition’s rules, not ours. First: one practice at a time, kept for two weeks, before you consider a second — the rush is the problem, not the cure. Second: do the practice and leave the result alone. Do not take your own spiritual temperature afterwards; the checking is itself a turning away.

The practices the book sends you to

• Asking Allah plainly for a guide About 1 minute
  A short, direct request in your own words, made once a day. — Section 0 — Seeking a Guide
• The dua of the seeker Under a minute, inside prayers you already pray
  Two supplications from the Qur’an, said at the times when asking is strongest. — Section 0 — Seeking a Guide
• Seeking without impatience One evening a week
  One bounded evening a week for the search, and no searching outside it. — Section 0 — Seeking a Guide
• What a true guide looks like A year of ordinary attendance
  Observable checks you run on a man over a year, not a list of qualities you admire. — Section 0 — Seeking a Guide
• The company of the sincere 1 hour a week
  How to find one steady man when there is no circle to join. — Section 10 — Adab With People

Where the first one comes from

Allah says in Surah Ghafir, “Call upon Me, I will respond to you” (40:60), and in Surah al-Nahl, “Ask the people of remembrance if you do not know” (16:43). Al-Qushayri closes al-Risala with counsel that a man who trains only himself will not prosper, and Ghazali says the same in Book 22 of the Ihya: the first way a man learns his own faults is to sit before someone who can see them.

Other sentences

• “I have found a man who says he is a shaykh, and something is wrong.”
• “I am jealous of a man I have to see every week.”
• “There is a man I cannot stand and I cannot get away from him.”