The Angel Who Never Rests, and the Saying of a Companion

Ibn ʿAbbās (may Allah be pleased with him) said: the day Allah created the heavens and the earth, He created an angel, a malak, and ordered that angel to say lā ilāha illallāh. This angel lengthens his delivery as he utters it, as he says this lā ilāha illallāh, and will not rest from this duty, this obligation, until he hears the trumpet, the ṣūr, of Isrāfīl (peace be upon him). One of the Companions relates a different version — this one being the saying of a Companion, qawl ṣaḥābī: whoever says lā ilāha illallāh and lengthens his pronunciation, intending thereby to glorify and magnify Allah (swt), four thousand grave sins will be remitted from him. This is the hadith already given; but this Companion says it as if he were saying it himself. Why? Why did he not say, qāla rasūlullāh, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said? The reason is very simple. There is a mutawātir hadith of the Prophet (peace be upon him): ballighū ʿannī wa law āyah, wa ḥaddithū ʿan Banī Isrāʾīl wa lā ḥaraj, wa man kadhaba ʿalayya mutaʿammidan fal-yatabawwaʾ maqʿadahu min al-nār. Even if it is one verse, one hadith, one word that you have learned from me, convey it to other people: tell it to others, teach it to others. And you may speak of the stories of Banī Isrāʾīl that I have told you and that you have heard from others, so long as they are true, and do not go against the Sharīʿah, and are not nonsense, and are within Islam. But he who attributes to me a lie — saying that I said something I never said, fabricating a hadith on my behalf, falsifying my statement and deliberately saying that I said something — mutaʿammidan fal-yatabawwaʾ maqʿadahu min al-nār: let him prepare his eternal address, his eternal abode, his eternal place of settlement in Jahannam.

Because of this, the Companions were so afraid that, though they heard everything from the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him), they would not relate it to anybody else as qāla rasūlullāh, lest perchance they make a mistake. One day they came to the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) and said: O Messenger of Allah, you told us to convey your message to others, but we are not as eloquent as you are; you are jawāmiʿ al-kalim; when you speak, māshāʾAllāh, light, beauty, honey come out of your mouth; but when we try to memorise and to explain to others, we might make a mistake — what happens then? The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said: as long as your intention is correct, and you intend to relate exactly what you heard from me, even in your own expression, this too is acceptable. Even then, even then, the majority of the hundred and twenty thousand Companions of the Prophet (peace be upon him) did not convey any hadith. Abū Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) lived with the Prophet (peace be upon him); he was his closest friend since childhood, the second of the two in the cave — lā taḥzan inna Allāha maʿanā — and Abū Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) conveyed only five hundred hadith. When somebody related a hadith in front of ʿUmar, ʿUmar would not accept the hadith straight away unless he knew the person completely. He would say: come with me; come with me. This is ʿUmar. He would bring two other elder Companions beside them and say: tell me — were you there, in that house, where all these people were present, when the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said wa man kadhaba ʿalayya mutaʿammidan fal-yatabawwaʾ maqʿadahu min al-nār? Were you present? Did you hear this hadith from the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) — this warning that he who falsifies a hadith on my behalf must prepare his abode in Jahannam? Were you present there? The man would say yes — he was there, he was there, he was there. In other words: you know what you are about to say, you know the curse, you know the warning of punishment for falsifying anything against the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him); if you understand this, then speak, and we can listen to you. This is ʿUmar.

So many of the Companions say only, we used to do this; or, it is a good deed, ḥasanāt, if you do this — as this Companion says: he who says lā ilāha illallāh while stretching it, lengthening the lā ilāha illallāh, Allah (swt) will destroy four thousand of his sins. Perhaps he was there when Anas ibn Mālik was there too. But Anas ibn Mālik is of a different category altogether: he narrates it as qāla rasūlullāh. This Companion says: if you say lā ilāha illallāh while stretching the lā ilāha illallāh, Allah will destroy four thousand of your major sins — but he does not say that it is a hadith. So this is qawl ṣaḥābī, mawqūf, stopping at the Companion himself. It is related in a different hadith: whoever says lā ilāha illallāh and lengthens his pronunciation, intending thereby to magnify Allah (swt), four thousand of his sins are struck thereby from the register of his sins. Hence it is absolutely praiseworthy among the fuqahāʾ, among the Islamic scholars, to lengthen one's pronunciation upon uttering lā ilāha illallāh. As Imam al-Nawawī (may Allah have mercy on him) said, the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) also said: whoever lengthens his pronunciation upon saying lā ilāha illallāh, Allah will make him live in Paradise in the abode of majesty, dār al-jalāl, by which He has named Himself when He said, bismillāhi al-raḥmāni al-raḥīm:

There remains the Countenance of your Lord, Allah (swt), full of majesty and honour. Allah, Imam al-Nawawī says, will grant that person the sight of His beauty, His jamāl, from Paradise.