Yaser M. Haddara

Things have been hectic, hence the last two week hiatus. I am still working on that loooong article on humor in classic texts, but in the meantime the buffer has filled up with things I’ve been meaning to post. So a few entries to follow. The long post will most likely come next week inshaa Allah. In the meantime I’ll try to keep you busy with things that have backed up in the queue :)

Abdul asked about the hadeeth “that Allah says that I am to my servant as he /she thinks of me” and he says “does it mean that we should always think ‘merciful’ and that way we’ll be more prone to mercy?”. The short answer is that yes that is what it means and we should always strengthen our hope in God’s mercy. To shed a little more light on this I looked it up in ibn Hajar’s commentary on Bukhari and Imam al-Nawawy’s commentary on Muslim. They make a number of significant points:

1. Imam al-Nawawy is explicit in stating the simple meaning mentioned above, that the hadeeth motivates us to have hope in God’s pardon (الرجاء وتأميل العفو).
2. True hope is what is joined with action. So if you call upon God in the manner that He prescribed and while fulfilling the conditions that He has set then you should be in no doubt that He will respond. Similarly if you sincerely seek to come closer to Him you should be in doubt that He will guide you. “Hope” that is used as an “excuse” or justification of the abandonment of effort is pure delusion.
3. The opposite of hope is despair (not fear, true fear complements true hope). When one’s awareness of his/her own shortcomings, failings, sins, error, etc., is so acute and so destructive as to leave one in no doubt of being lost, then one is indeed lost - another hadeeth says that for such a person “God will consign him to what he expected of God.”
4. During a person’s life the emotions of love of God, hope of His mercy, and fear of His displeasure should all work together. Scholars differed in the matter of hope and fear as to which, if either, should be more prevalent in the servant’s mind. The debate arises from the simple fact that there is still room for action and so the question becomes how to spur oneself on to better action. At the time of death, however, scholars used this hadeeth as well as other texts and knowledge to emphasize that one should categorically be hopeful at the moment of death. This is because the time for action is ended and all that is left is God’s mercy.
5. There are two beautiful quotes included in the commentaries on this hadeeth. Imam al-Nawawy quotes al-Qady (I believe he means Abu Bakr ibn al-Araby) to say that the “thinking” or “expectation” referred to here is “forgiveness when he asks for forgiveness, acceptance when he repents, a positive answer when he supplicates, and sufficiency when he asks for sufficiency.” Ibn Hajar quotes Imam al-Qurtuby to say that the “thinking” or “expectation” is “to expect a positive answer when he supplicates, to expect acceptance when he repents, to expect forgiveness when he asks for forgiveness, and to expect reward when he worships God fulfilling the conditions of that worship, and to expect these because of his holding firm the truth of God’s promise.”

On a separate note, just before I took this latest hiatus I had posted “The Best and the Worst” — two sayings of the prophet, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, that describe for us the best and the worst. From your comments it seems to have resonated and for that we say al-hamdulillah. Nonetheless some of the reaction was unexpected, at least to me. We can sometimes be our own worst critics - and that in a destructive not constructive manner. Of course it is important to worry about oneself and to challenge oneself to identify and work against shortcomings. But two very important things need to be noted.

The first issue is quite general and not specific to this particular case. The prophet, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, said, “If your doing good feels good to you, and doing bad feels bad to you, then you are a believer.” There is also a saying (not sure if it is a hadeeth) that Shaytan does not come into a ruined house. In short, if you are questioning yourself, challenging yourself, worrying about your faith and your goodness and your spirituality, then inshaa Allah that itself is the indication that you are traveling the right road. Inshaa Allah you’ll get there. Just keep the faith, and keep going.

The second issue is specific to this case. The prophet, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, is filling us with hope and joy. He is telling us if we are simply kind, then God will be kind to us. Indeed it is important to fulfill our legal obligations, to study to deepen our faith, to struggle to excel in spirituality, to persevere in the obedience of God, to feel and manifest gratitude to God, and all the other ways of thinking about coming closer to God, an ambition that should have no end short of the meeting with God, and a desire that should not be sated until God by His grace enters us into paradise and favors us with the sight of Him. And in seeking this ambition and struggling on this path we should always be setting the bar higher and be critical and all the rest of it. But what these two sayings are telling us is that sometimes we need to step back from the struggle and put in perspective the central importance of human relations: the bottom line is that if God has graced us with the genuine desire to be good to others, then He is telling us that He will be good to us! And there is nothing in all the universe that is more merciful, or more beautiful, or more conducive of hope than the knowledge that simple human kindness may save us.