The Guest Who Became a Muslim

So it was that Ibrahim (peace be upon him) never ate without a guest. One day he could not eat, because there was no guest; a second day passed the same way, and still no guest. Troubled by it, he went outside and waited, on the road, for he lived out in the countryside, waiting for somebody to pass through, so that he could ask that person to come and join him and eat.

He finally saw somebody walking: a very old man, his hair completely white, perhaps eighty-five or ninety years old, walking slowly, slowly, with a stick. Here, at last, was a guest. Ibrahim welcomed him gladly, and they sat down together to eat, each beginning with bismillāh. Three or four mouthfuls in, Ibrahim asked who he was. The man answered that he was a Majūsī — astaghfirullāh al-ʿaẓīm — a fire-worshipper, a mushrik, seated at his own table. Get away, Ibrahim told him, get away from my table. The man said only that Ibrahim had been the one to invite him, and Ibrahim the one to send him away, and got up and left.

As the man walked off, Jibrīl (peace be upon him) came to Ibrahim at once, bringing him the salām of Allah (swt), and told him besides that Allah (swt) had been feeding that fire-worshipper for the past seventy or eighty years, and had never once complained. Allah (swt) is al-Raḥmān, so merciful a Lord, al-Razzāqu li-kulli shayʾ, the One who gives every creature its food, and Allah (swt) never complains — yet Ibrahim, over one single meal, had complained. Ibrahim understood at once what he had done. He ran after the old man, apologising again and again, and pressed him to come back and eat.

The man asked why he had so suddenly changed his mind, and Ibrahim told him plainly that his Lord had rebuked him, through Jibrīl, for what he had done. The man asked whether it was truly so — that his Creator had rebuked him on his account — and on being told that it was, he declared, there and then, that he bore witness that there was none worthy of worship besides Allah, and that Ibrahim was His messenger, and he became a Muslim. This, then, was the second reason Ibrahim (peace be upon him) became Khalīlullāh: that he never, ever worried about what Allah (swt) had already allotted him of livelihood, of rizq.