The Hadith of the Four Decrees

There is a famous hadith of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) — one of the miracles of the Qur'an and of the sciences it touches, spoken fourteen hundred years ago, at which people's jaws still drop in amazement on first hearing it. It concerns qadar, and it is found in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, agreed upon by both, and in the collection of Imam al-Nawawī (may Allah have mercy on him), among many other books besides.

ʿAbdullāh ibn Masʿūd (may Allah be pleased with him), a small man of short stature among the companions, reported that the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him), the most truthful and the most trusted, told them: the creation of any one of them takes place when they are gathered together in their mother's womb for forty days as a drop of fluid, then for a similar period as a clot, then for a similar period as a lump that looks as though it has been chewed. After that, an angel is sent to breathe the rūḥ, the spirit, into that person, and is commanded to write down four matters: that person's rizq, his life span, his deeds, and whether he will be among the wretched or the blessed.

This hadith concerns the qadar of Allah (swt), and every person's rizq is written before birth, on the hundredth and twentieth day, once the third period of forty days is completed. It is not, as is sometimes supposed, simply that the brain has by then developed further; rather, it is the day on which the heart itself begins to pump, and it is on that day that life, the rūḥ, is given, and these matters are written. The first of them is how much a person will eat in this world — rizq that is fixed and cannot be changed. Among the wealthiest people of their time have been those who, being type-1 diabetic, could eat almost nothing at all, whose blood pressure rose with anything they touched, and who could enjoy nothing of what their wealth might otherwise have bought them. Rizq, properly defined, is what goes into the throat and into the body's own system of nourishment and health, not merely what sits in a person's pocket — though wealth, too, in a wider sense, is a form of rizq. The angel writes down, at Allah's (swt) command, in al-Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ, in Kitāb al-Mubīn, the Preserved Tablet and the Clear Book, exactly what has been allotted — which is why there is no reason to worry.

The anxiety may as well be set aside entirely: an employer is not in charge of anyone's rizq — only Allah (swt) is. An employer may dismiss an employee, but that employee's rizq does not lie in the employer's hands; another position will be found through some other means, some other sabab, and Allah (swt) will provide another portion of rizq through it. No child of a believer will ever go hungry; it is simply impossible. Allah (swt) is the one who provides — but belief in Him is what is required.