Abu al-‘Abbas ‘Abdullah bin ‘Abbas, radiyallahu anhuma, reported: One day I was behind the Prophet, sallallahu 'alayhi wasallam, and he said to me:
“O young man, I shall teach you some words [of advice]: Be mindful of Allah, and Allah will protect you. Be mindful of Allah, and you will find Him in front of you. If you (have need to) ask, ask of Allah; and if you seek help, seek help from Allah. Know that even if the Nation (or the whole community) were to gather together to benefit you with something, they would not benefit you with anything except that which Allah has already recorded for you, and that if they gather together to harm you with something, they would not be able to harm you with anything except that which Allah has already recorded against you. The pens have been lifted and the pages have dried.”
[Al-Tirmidhi]
This is one of the forty hadith collected by imam Nawawi. It’s important to note that when receiving this advice, Abdullah was only around 13 years of age. In offering advice I reflected, what better advice to give than the advice that Muhammad himself offered to a young man of faith who was coming of age? The Arabic noun for “humans” comes from the Arabic root word meaning “to forget.” This is not by coincidence, but God’s affirmation of the human’s forgetful nature. And so, when we bend and break, the world seeks to remind us. It calls us to a hope that only God allows to emanate. It facilitates for us a path to the words of Allah and His messenger (peace be upon him) that will carry us, sometimes seamlessly and other times in ebbs and flows. This hadith illustrates one such path.
The following are my commentaries to contextualize and connect the different components of the hadith.
Be mindful of Allah.
Mindfulness is a skill. I’d confidently argue that in our present day, it is more difficult to be mindful than it was during the time of the prophet (saw). Industry is based on efficiency and convenience, so whereas the nomad of the desert would trek his terrain knowing only Allah could bring him water or fruit, the “city nomad” treks concrete sidewalks knowing that with a push of a few buttons on his phone, he could order a pizza and be full for the rest of the night.
In both scenarios, the sustenance (rizq) is from Allah. But in the former, the level of effort needed to attain the rizq was much greater and thus mindfulness was a consequence, not solely an intention. So, would there not be greater reward for the mindfulness of the city nomad? Would he not have to strive and consistently remind himself of God’s bounty? What about considering the forgetfulness of man? Would he not have to work to undo the desensitization of Allah’s might that he has suffered?
If you ask/seek help then ask/seek help of Allah.
In our present day context, unless we are in a situation of “misfortune,” it is easy to forget the Facilitator, Allah, in all that we receive and all that we need. Aisha (ra) makes mention to ask Allah for anything and everything, even if it were a shoelace. The minuteness of the request is one meant to humble us. A reminder that something as simple as a shoelace, we could not receive without Allah’s intervention.
I watched an interesting TED talk on a man who went on a journey searching for rejection (click here to watch it). For 100 days, he’d make ridiculous requests to others, expecting a no. And sometimes, to his utter surprise, the request would be granted. Why? Because he asked. And not just that he asked, but (as he points out) he persisted, ie. when he got a “no,” he didn’t take it without insisting. This technique is one that Allah loves when His servants ask of Him. He loves that we persist. Sometimes, Allah withholds what we ask for knowing that if we were to receive it, we would no longer call to Allah.
The process of refining our “asking” can only be described as a paradigm shift. I offer an exercise to try, something I and the ladies in my closed halaqa have been doing. We sat down and asked ourselves “what are five things that we desperately want in our lives (dunya and akhira)?”. This filters out everything else that is just seasoning. Then we challenged ourselves to make those 5 duaas every... single... day. We adjusted our places of duaa as needed (for example, I make my duaas during sujood in salah.) But the paradigm shift here was that we institutionalized asking Allah into our day.
Be it benefit or harm, it’ll only come to you by God’s will.
A mentor of mine said something quite simply. “We’re just racing to catch up with what Allah has written for us.” She said this to me after I confided my extreme worry about my GRE (a standardized exam for graduate school entry). And when she said that, it was as if I could feel the worry melting. How merciful was God that He destined that I would be okay and that the sole pressure of attaining success was not on me.
The question to myself was, would I be pleased with Allah’s will if I receive exactly what I had feared (in this case, a bad score on the exam)? And to be honest, I still don’t know if my exam score is written to bring me harm or benefit (I still haven’t applied to graduate school) but I make duaa for a result that is pleasing to me because duaa alters destiny.
The pens have been lifted and the pages have dried.
50,000 years before the heavens and the earth were brought to fruition, Allah created The Pen.
The concept of the pen is an extraordinarily philosophical and complicated one. So rather than explaining it myself, I offer three resources from Sheikh Omar Suleiman’s “The Beginning and the End” series. They’re a few minutes each, so enjoy here, here and here (this video goes along well with the previous part of the hadith). The only qualifier I have here is to note that Allah is NOT confined by time. So while we try to grapple with destiny and decree, we can only try to understand it in the context of a past, present and future. Thus our confusion here is from the limitation of our knowledge. And allow is Al-Aleem, The All-Knowing.
H. Al.
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