Sabr Against Tahammul

There is no human being on earth who does not go through some hardship — of one colour, one shade, one grade or another — but without doubt everyone goes through some sort of hardship. And without doubt everyone has a way of dealing with it. This dealing with hardship, with difficulty, has two possibilities. One is to deny it, not to accept it, to ignore it. The second possibility is to put up with it, to carry it. And the way of putting up with it, of showing patience toward it, itself takes two forms. One is called in Arabic ṣabr, and the other is called taḥammul, from the word ḥilm: forbearing. Ṣabr is patience; taḥammul is forbearing.

Forbearing is not what is meant here. Forbearing is this: a calamity strikes, an affliction strikes, a balāʾ hits a person on the head, and he goes into denial; he does not accept it; he cries, he swears, and everything else. Then the pain is still there — like a hot chilli that cannot be got rid of, burning everything — and no matter how much he cries, no matter what he drinks, he still has to bear the pain. So he says: since I cannot get rid of it that easily, I might as well put up with it. This is called forbearance, taḥammul. It is not the best thing in Islam. Ṣabr, by contrast, is the reaction shown in the first instant, when the calamity strikes.

If ṣabr has its rules and regulations, then the ḥasanāt, the reward that Allah (swt) gives for it, cannot even be imagined. Rasūlullāh (peace be upon him) speaks of the human being who loses a beloved one, a loved one — a child, a mother; usually it is parents losing their children. The pain a mother goes through when her child is dead cannot be explained; it is impossible for anyone else to understand it. But there is the ajr, the ḥasanāt, that Allah (swt) attaches to the ṣabr shown right at the first instant — accepting that it is from Allah (swt), swallowing that pain, the tears coming through and rolling down the cheeks, and yet accepting in the heart that it is from Allah (swt): accepting His design, accepting His fate, accepting His colour. He gave this beautiful creature, and He has taken that beautiful creature away, and one is in pain. If a person knew the ḥasanāt, the reward, that Allah (swt) is going to give him on the Day of Judgement — Rasūlullāh (peace be upon him) says that on the Day of Judgement, when the human being sees the ḥasanāt he has received for having shown ṣabr toward somebody he lost, he will say: I wish my parents, my relatives, my sons, my uncles, everybody before me — I wish they had all died before me, so that I could have all those ḥasanāt.

This is not a suggestion that anyone should make duʿāʾ for his parents to die before him — no, no, no; nothing of the kind is being suggested. The point is the ḥasanāt for ṣabr: when the balāʾ strikes, when the calamity strikes, the way a person reacts to it in a positive manner, in the way Allah (swt) is pleased with, is what is called ṣabr — not taḥammul. Taḥammul is when nothing can be done about it any more and the whinging simply stops — after two or three years, perhaps, or two or three hours, five hours, ten hours. Everybody has a different way of reacting to a balāʾ, a calamity.