The Third Groove: There Is No Small Sin

The third groove of the key to Paradise is to keep away from whatever Allah (swt) has made munkar, made illegal — from any of the prohibited things, manhiyyāt, from the disliked things, makrūhāt, even from the simple doubtful things. A person needs to work on this. The excuse comes easily: it is only doubtful; it is only makrūh; it is only a small thing. Big things start from small things. Lā ṣaghīrata maʿa al-iṣrār: if a person insists on something small, in the belief that it is only small, it no longer retains its size; it grows, and grows.

A group of Muslims were travelling with the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him), and they came to a place where they had to take a break, having walked for hours. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said: let us light a fire; we need some wood. There was no wood in the place — absolutely nothing. Then the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) told everybody to go about and pick up whatever they could see on the ground, little chips of wood. Hundreds of people, thousands, began to collect, and when they came back into the presence of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) it was a huge pile. They marvelled that from the empty ground they had come to, where they thought there was nothing, there was all of a sudden a huge pile of rubbish, or of something to burn. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) turned to them and said: this is how human beings are in their perception of small sins. It is only a small sin, ṣaghīrah; only a small sin. Because the commanding self, al-nafs al-ammārah, is the hero, the superstar of a person's kingdom, his ego never, ever regards a small sin as anything significant, and so it says: it is only small; Allah is Ghafūr Raḥīm. But whoever insists on it ends up, eventually, with a pile of sins. So the third groove is that a Muslim must be on the alert even over small sins, and careful in his attitude towards sin.

ʿUzayr (peace be upon him) received a revelation from Allah (swt); Allah (swt) revealed to ʿUzayr (peace be upon him): O ʿUzayr, do not look at the size of the sin you commit, but consider against whom you are committing it. Sin, of any size or shape or manner, is active, defiant disobedience: a person is actively disobeying and defying Allah (swt). That is what it is. Take, as an example of such a sin, the man who calls his own mother by the name of an animal — a donkey one day, a cow the next, another animal the day after — and excuses it on the grounds that she does not mind, and that it is, after all, only the name of an animal. From such a thing one seeks refuge in Allah and asks His forgiveness. What is a mother to conclude of a son who speaks of her in this way, except that she has brought yet another animal into the world? A man who speaks like this has lost his natural disposition; he is no longer a human being in the full sense, and sees nothing around him but cows and dogs and donkeys. Allah (swt) is greatly angered by the one who persists in such small sins. These, then, are the three grooves.