A Word Here or There: The Brother From Canada

Some contemporary examples show how something very small, done without a thought, can make a big difference. There is a hadith, too, that says a person might speak a word that pleases Allah without paying it any attention, and Allah (swt) will raise them up levels because of it; and a person might speak a word that angers Allah, and because of it they will be thrown into Hellfire. It's a matter of a word here or there. There is the account of a brother from Canada. He said that he started having interest in learning religion at a very early age, around the age of nine — he started studying religion. That's quite early. He said he was turned away from Islam because of a lesson that he was taught in school about Islam — he was shown some images that turned him away from Islam. And then he said he was going through some problems in his family — his father left, and his mother was on drugs — so he said he completely forgot about this issue of religion, even though he had some early interest in it.

He said, and then he became a drug user, and then he was promoted to being a drug dealer, and he went to jail at the age of fourteen. So he had a turbulent life. He said, later on, towards his later teenage years, after he came out of jail, he used to go to this park in Canada — it's in the centre of the city — and that's where the drug addicts would usually congregate. "We would all smoke and use our drugs, and you'd find needles all over, and that's where we would all come together and get high," he said. "So I went there, and I was sitting next to this guy who looked foreign. And I was smoking my dope, and I saw something interesting."

He said the way that this guy next to him used to wrap his marijuana, or hashish, or whatever it was — "I'm not very familiar with their specific terms" — the way he used to wrap it was different, so that caught his eye. "I asked him, 'I see that the way you wrap your hashish is different. Where are you from?' He said, 'I'm from Morocco.' He said, 'So you must be a Muslim.' He said, 'Yes, I'm a Muslim.' He said, 'Can you tell me something about Islam?'" Now he's remembering his early years of studying about religion. He said, "Tell me about Islam." He said, "So this Moroccan guy was going through the tenets of Islam, and we're all smoking, and we're very high, and I mean, he's speaking, and I'm just receiving all of that information and absorbing it. I mean, we're both high. He's speaking very well, and I'm understanding very well."

He said, "For two hours continuously, we were talking about Islam, until we ran out of drugs — we had nothing left." He said, and then, "we continued the conversation for another two hours" — four hours in total. And he said that Allah (swt) sent another person to sit next to us — SubḥānAllāh — an Algerian person, who wasn't on drugs or anything, who was just there, he happened to be there. He said, "He sent him to us, to correct whatever mistakes that person would make" — you know, people have different understandings of Islam, so they would correct each other, and whenever one of them would mention something wrong, the other person would correct the false information. He said, "We continued the conversation for four hours. After that, I became Muslim. Now, neither the Algerian nor the Moroccan person knew that I became Muslim, because I left and then became Muslim on my own, and I stopped using drugs."

And I actually met him, and he was doing daʿwah at the time. When he was telling us his story, there was a group of us. So one of the brothers who was sitting and hearing the story said a bad word about that Moroccan person, because of using drugs. This Canadian Muslim brother — his face turned red, and he became very upset and angry, and he said, "Don't speak about him, because I became Muslim through him. And every single thing that I do — my ṣalāh, my salām, my zakāh, my duʿāʾ, every single thing that I do — a copy of it will be deposited in his account."

Now, only Allah knows where that person is. He might still be in the park using drugs. He might be lost, and he never knows that in his account is ṣalāh and ṣiyām and zakāh, all deposited, and he has no idea about it. He'll come on the Day of Judgment and see all of this and not know where it came from. "I was in those parks using drugs — where did all of these good deeds come from?" It all happened because of a few words that he said to a drug addict like himself. Now, maybe he never knew that this person would become Muslim, maybe he never intended it — he just was conversing, talking — but he threw something good out there, and these are the fruits of it.

So nothing should ever be belittled. A small thing done here and there might be the cause of salvation on the Day of Judgment, while the big things — the big projects, the things a person spends a lot of time on — might not bear such a harvest. This is something in the hands of Allah alone, so there is no way to know in advance. Whatever good can be done should therefore be done and left out there — the seeds thrown, and Allah (swt) will make them grow. But nothing should be belittled — wa law an talqā akhāka bi-wajhin ḥasan — even if it is as much as smiling in the face of your brother.