A Story of Fixed Provision

There is the account of a good friend — may Allah (swt) grant him a long life, if he is still living — who kept a pizza shop in Elmore. Speaking once on this very topic, he said he would tell of something that had happened to him, which went to prove that a person's rizq is fixed. He told, then, of a day when he received a telephone call at around eleven in the morning, having opened his shop, as he always did, at five o'clock: a customer needed seventy-six pizzas for a party. Taking the order without hesitation, he went in early and prepared the dough — and all the while he was doing his sums in his head. His usual trade through a night's opening ran to about eighty pizzas, not a great deal, just the eighty; seventy-six on top of that, he reckoned, meant close to double the night's earnings, so he made double the dough.

The party's order was collected at five o'clock and carried away. But he said — wa-llāhi al-ʿaẓīm, by the Almighty — that from five o'clock until half past eleven or midnight, the whole of the rest of the night, he sold only four more pizzas, and the telephone did not ring again. Seventy-six plus four came, in the end, to exactly his usual eighty. He had thought himself in control of his own rizq; Allah (swt) alone was in control of it.

This is the difficulty many people fall into: anxiety when a job is lost, when the boot is given, or the sack, or when a position is retrenched. The strain brings on real psychological difficulty, at times even a process of rehabilitation, out of the fear that poverty and destitution now lie ahead — and, by the Almighty, that fear is unfounded, for rizq is in the hands of Allah (swt), not in one's own hands.