Hadith literature attributes to the Prophet a set of specific, practical instructions for a person overtaken by anger that later akhlaq writers treat as a graduated programme rather than a single remedy: if angry while standing, sit down, and if the anger persists even sitting, lie down, a sequence understood as progressively reducing the physical posture available to aggressive action; a separate hadith recommends performing ablution, wudu, on the reasoning, attributed in some transmissions to the Prophet himself, that anger is a live coal from Satan kindled in the heart and water extinguishes fire.
Ghazali reads these instructions as consistent with his broader therapeutic method across the vices, addressing a spiritual state through concrete, repeatable bodily practice rather than through willpower exercised in the moment of provocation alone, since he holds that a mind already overtaken by ghadab has temporarily lost the capacity for the kind of reasoned self correction moral advice alone would require. Sabr, patience or forbearance, is presented across this literature as ghadab's specific and named contrary virtue, the disposition cultivated in advance that reduces how often and how forcefully anger arises in the first place, making the pairing of the two among the most consistently stated opposed terms in the entire akhlaq tradition.