The Smartest Is the One Who Guards Against the Fire

This is the guidance given: a human user manual, so to speak, placed in every person's hands. Allah's mercy is infinite, and the path has already been shown; what is asked is attention. The first hurdle, the first impediment, the first barrier, remains jahālah, ignorance, and it must be crossed by real effort in learning the religion, or nothing further can be achieved at all. Missing this chance while the mind is still fresh and unburdened by other commitments carries a real cost: there are people who weep daily over having missed it, now working shifts of six, ten or twelve hours, feeding families, carrying responsibilities that leave no room to return to it. Whatever was learned while young stays with a person and continues to guide; neglecting Islamic education, depriving oneself of it, failing to attach oneself to an Islamic centre or to a shaykh, one of the shuyūkh, capable of teaching what is actually required to run a life properly, leads to real trouble later — however much a person continues to dream and fantasise that Allah (swt) will simply forgive it all. It remains, again, only a fifty-fifty chance, and a considerable risk to take. It is never too late, all the same, since in this religion learning runs from the cradle to the grave; it must only be pursued with sincerity.

Whoever intends to marry needs to learn what is lawful and unlawful in marriage; whoever is given the chance to open a business needs to learn what is lawful and unlawful in trade, tijārah; whoever is choosing a course of study for university, a major decision by any measure, ought to ask for guidance in making it rather than choosing blindly, without thought, simply because it pays well. A course chosen purely because it promises the money for a fine red car has, in the end, nothing to show for it before Allah (swt): the car itself will eventually be sold on or worn out, and its owner along with it. A person clinging instead to the fantasy that Allah (swt) is al-Ghafūr al-Raḥīm, that tawbah can simply be made later, that Ḥajj will be performed once life has settled down, and that a day spent at ʿArafah wipes every sin away and sends a person home a newborn, ought to look honestly at what that Ḥajj itself tends to become. There is the case of pilgrims who came back from it able to describe nothing more than the number of minarets on the Masjid al-Ḥarām, the marble underfoot, the heat, and a stop for a meal at KFC while out shopping — genuinely bewildering, even astonishing and dismaying, to hear offered as an account of the rite. Such an account is no account of Ḥajj: the rūḥ, the spirit, of the religion was never penetrated, its fiqh never grasped, its message never truly understood — only the surface was touched, and even there poorly — and a pilgrim of this kind returns, as from so much else approached this way, essentially empty-handed. Many likewise leave the masjid after ṣalāh empty-handed, believing their hearts to be sound even as they step straight back onto a path of unlawful business or an unlawful life.

The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) is reported to have said that Allah (swt) rewards a person's prayer according to that person's intellect. The companions were troubled by this. "Ya Rasūlullāh," they said, "it is not our fault if Allah (swt) endowed us with different levels of intellect — some of us are simpletons, some of us are of superior intellect, some of us are simply smarter; it is not our fault that Allah (swt) made us this way." The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) smiled and explained that this was not his meaning at all: the most intelligent person is the one who keeps away from what Allah (swt) has made unlawful, who guards himself against it — not someone who lives a double life, professing Islam in name while living otherwise, appearing as a Muslim on Fridays and as something else, known only to Allah (swt), every other day of the week. Islam is one; Islamic practice is one; Allah (swt) is one; the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) is one; the Sunnah is one; and Allah's law, sunnatullāh, is one as well. Neglect of this obligation brings its own punishment even in this world — and where it spares the person concerned, it often falls instead upon the children. There is the account of an elderly man, asked after prayer one day how his own children were faring, whose eyes filled with tears. "Lost," he said, unable to understand why. Decades earlier, when the invitation had gone out to bring those same children to the madrasah, to be taught, they had been too occupied learning something else instead; and now that they were grown and their father wished them to return, they had no wish to, because something else had already filled what was in their hearts and shaped their whole outlook on life — filled there by someone else's teaching, not by their own upbringing, making them seem, to a father who had known them for thirty-five years, like strangers, alien to everything he had raised them to be. Protecting children, and oneself, from the Fire (66:6) means becoming a genuinely practising Muslim, taking the religion seriously in full.