The Hidden Wisdom Behind Tragedy

He had been there to teach him, and so he explained. As for the boat: there is a reason behind all of it, and the reason is that the ruler of that region confiscates any good boat. So it was not made to sink; it was only made defective, damaged, so that the ruler would not take it. This was in fact doing them a favour: rather than losing the whole boat, only a part of it was damaged, and they can mend it.

As for the boy: this child was to become a bad man. Allah knew that this child was to become a bad man. There are many matters of qadar here which need not be entered upon. For a treatment of qadar there is a lecture entitled Don't Be Depressed, You Don't Know Your Future, of about an hour and a quarter, which treats the whole matter of free will, destiny and predestination in great detail and is well worth hearing; it will give, one hopes, some satisfying understanding of the complicated matter of qadar. His parents loved him greatly, and the trial he would have been to them would have been too great, to the point that he might at length have taken them into kufr and shirk. So he was taken in death, and Allah would give them in his place far better children.

And the third: those people may have given them no food, but the wall that was mended and renewed belonged to two orphans whose parents had been good people; and beneath the rest of the wall, it appears, lay treasure, wealth left by their parents, and they were not yet old enough to look after it. When they grew older they would find it. This was doing them a good turn.

From this story comes the understanding that a great many things seem strange upon the face of them; that is the lesson to be taken from it. Upon the face of things, people die, a child dies, there is an accident, a man is wounded, and the question arises: what benefit is there in this? There is always a benefit. A man may go into hospital with what seems a small matter, and think it hard and ill fortune, when he may have been saved from something greater — and Allah alone knows. Sometimes the reason for it is discovered later, even after thirty years, or forty, or seventy; and sometimes it is never discovered. That is why, whatever has happened, it must be left to Allah: that this is how it was to be. Mistakes are to be learned from, but spilt milk is not to be wept over for ever. Hence the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) said, in a hadith of Muslim, to seek out eagerly what is to one's benefit, and not to be rendered helpless, sitting back and made impotent, merely because an attempt has failed five times. Those who keep trying will get somewhere, if Allah (swt) wills it.