“Indeed, Your Efforts are Diverse”

As per our habit, I was teaching my child Surat al-Layl a couple of days ago, going over it line by line the way you do with a child, when we came to the words inna sa’yakum la-shatta, and my mind began to wander. So I decided it was time to teach my little boy a lesson. Allah says,

إِنَّ سَعْيَكُمْ لَشَتَّىٰ

“Indeed, your efforts are diverse.” (Surat al-Layl 92:4)

The word is shatta, meaning scattered, various, diverse, running in different directions, and Allah says it of the effort itself before He says a word about its reward. Sitting there with my child, I wandered about how wide our merciful Allah has made this Deen and how much room He has left inside it, to fit all of us. He never asked every servant to do the same work or to walk the same road. He spread the work of His religion across so many different people, and He promised to take something from each of us. The longer I turned it over, the more it looked like mercy, that a person can come to Allah from almost anywhere and enter by almost any door, and that nothing sincere is ever lost or wasted.

The work of the Deen is like a vast path, far wider than any one of us could traverse ourselves. It runs from our local imam who manages and steadies a whole community to the local brothers out on the road calling people back to the Masjid, from the scholar tracing a chain of narration back through the centuries to the teacher of the Arabic alphabet bent over a child’s first letters, from the woman raising believers in her own home to the man who feeds the poor out of his own pocket.

The service of Deen offers opportunity to the one who donates as well as the one who fasts, the one who goes out to fight injustice, and the one who keeps his Lord on his tongue when he is alone. No one of us can do all of that, and no one has to. And yet, we find ourselves standing in front of that wide field, deciding which parts of the work matter most and which do not. More often than not, most of us see our work as the most virtuous, as if Allah has restricted His mercy to what we can offer. This is where the harm starts, because once a community begins to rank its own, the race to the bottom is not far behind.

None of it feels like contempt while we are doing it, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. The scholar burning the midnight oil, deep in hadith and tafsir research, can come to see the man teaching alif baa taa as doing something small, a task for those not ready for the ‘higher’ work. The imam at the front of the community can look at the one giving tarbiya to children in a back room and think the real work lies elsewhere. The brother out in tabligh, going door to door, street to street to call people back to Allah, can wonder what the man behind a desk administering zakat or settling the community’s quarrels is really adding, while that man can glance at the same brother and see plenty of movement and little settled knowledge. The one who spends his evenings with giving da’wah to non-Muslims can decide that a community busy with itself has missed the point, and the one busy within it can decide that the work at the edges is a distraction from a house that still needs tending. We are each sure of our own effort and a little blind to everyone else’s. Before you speculate, I write this from the inside, because the pull to set my own work at the centre and weigh the rest against it is one I know too well.

Some of these efforts cover astonishing ground, none more visibly than tabligh: the brothers who sacrifice their wealth and their time, give weeks and months to it, leaving home and business to remind people of Allah, revive something in ordinary Muslims that is hard to reach any other way, and you see the fruit of it in the rows that fill again at Fajr. The danger for anyone whose work is that visible and that fruitful is to begin measuring the rest of the Deen against it, to assume that what cannot be seen out on the road is not really happening. Yet the same ummah they are reviving is kept on its feet by people they may never meet, like the one who feeds the poor and the mother raising the next row of worshippers, and the whole of it only works when every part runs at once, like a well-oiled machine.

Allah does not speak of the efforts of His servants the way we rank them, and the small task is rarely as small as it seems, since the child who learns his letters today is the one who reads the Quran tomorrow, and lives by it, and teaches it to those who come after us. The Prophet ﷺ said:

خَيْرُكُمْ مَنْ تَعَلَّمَ الْقُرْآنَ وَعَلَّمَهُ

“The best of you are those who learn the Quran and teach it.” (Bukhari 5027)

He drew no line between the teacher of the advanced and the teacher of the beginner, so the man who sits with a child over the first letters stands inside these words just like the man who explains the finest points of a hadith. If you take away the teacher of alif baa taa, no one is left to teach hadith to. This point was also noted by Mufti Taqi Uthmani, when a friend described his awe at the Mufti’s achievements whilst apparently belittling his own grassroot efforts. The same is true well beyond teaching, like the uncle who unlocks the masjid before Fajr, the one who feeds the jama’at out on the road, the one who serves their elderly neighbour, so that if you take any of them away, the work everyone can’t see comes to a stop.

It is reported that the fourth Caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib radhi-Allahu anhu said that whoever teaches you a single letter has a claim of service upon you, and looking back at it, it makes complete sense: honouring those who taught us our first letters are those to whom they owed a debt.

The Prophet ﷺ spoke about how we should treat the smaller acts of good. Abu Dharr radhi-Allahu anhu, reported that he said:

لَا تَحْقِرَنَّ مِنَ الْمَعْرُوفِ شَيْئًا

“Do not belittle any good deed.” (Muslim 2626)

If he told us not to belittle so much as meeting our brother with a smiling face, we can hardly consider the work of tarbiya, or da’wah, or the daily keeping of a community, as minor.

This is how the ummah began, with the Prophet ﷺ living every part of the Deen at once, following the path of Ibrahim alayhis salam, who Allah referred to as an ummah. The Prophet ﷺ received the Quran and recited it, he taught, he led the prayer and stood through the night in it, he judged between people, he took his place in the line of battle, he guided his household, he called strangers to Allah, and he kept the poor of Suffa close. He gathered in himself everything the community would later share out between many.

After him no single man could take on the whole of it, and none was asked to. The Companions took it up in parts, each taking the share that suited him. Some gave themselves to the Quran, receiving it, reciting it, writing it down, until the third Caliph Uthman radhi-Allahu anhu gathered it into a single book. Some devoted themselves to the hadith and passed it on so that his words would reach us at all. Some went out in the campaigns and opened lands, with Khalid ibn al-Walid radhi-Allahu anhu at their head. Others taught the halal and the haram, sat as judges, put their wealth to work for the Deen, or kept to worship and asked for little else.

Abu Hurayra radhi-Allahu anhu, understood this sharing of the work well. People remarked that he narrated more from the Prophet ﷺ than anyone else, and he answered them without any defensiveness. He said that his brothers among the Muhajirun were busy with their trade in the markets and his brothers among the Ansar with the work of their land, while he stayed close to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ on an empty stomach, there for what they had no time for and remembering what they could not stop to learn. He blamed no one for trading and no one for farming, because he knew that each of them saw to one corner of a life too large for a single man to manage on his own, and that the hadith reached the rest of us for the plain reason that this was the corner given to him. (See Bukhari 118)

The Prophet ﷺ had marked out their strengths himself, naming a different man for each. Anas ibn Malik radhi-Allahu anhu, reported that he said:

أَرْحَمُ أُمَّتِي بِأُمَّتِي أَبُو بَكْرٍ، وَأَشَدُّهُمْ فِي أَمْرِ اللَّهِ عُمَرُ، وَأَصْدَقُهُمْ حَيَاءً عُثْمَانُ، وَأَعْلَمُهُمْ بِالْحَلَالِ وَالْحَرَامِ مُعَاذُ بْنُ جَبَلٍ، وَأَفْرَضُهُمْ زَيْدُ بْنُ ثَابِتٍ، وَأَقْرَؤُهُمْ أُبَيُّ بْنُ كَعْبٍ، وَإِنَّ لِكُلِّ أُمَّةٍ أَمِينًا وَأَمِينُ هَذِهِ الْأُمَّةِ أَبُو عُبَيْدَةَ بْنُ الْجَرَّاحِ

“The most merciful of my ummah toward my ummah is Abu Bakr. The firmest in the matter of Allah is Umar. The most modest is Uthman. The most knowledgeable of the lawful and the unlawful is Mu’adh ibn Jabal. The most learned in the laws of inheritance is Zayd ibn Thabit. The best in recitation is Ubayy ibn Ka’b. And every ummah has a trusted one, and the trusted one of this ummah is Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah.” (Tirmidhi 3790)

He named each man for a single strength and gave no one all of them, and no one of them was everything the Prophet ﷺ had been, nor did any of them need to be, because between them they made up the whole of it. Some gave their lives to the Quran, and it came down to us as one book. Others gave their lives to his words, and they reached us too. Others still opened the lands, taught the law as it was revealed, and brought the poor through their hard years. Take any one of them away and we would have lost something of him.

Some of the Companions showed how far this went by the way they treated their own standing. Khalid ibn al-Walid radhi-Allahu anhu, had led the armies of the Muslims without a single defeat, until Umar radhi-Allahu anhu, in his caliphate, took the command from him and set Abu Ubayda radhi-Allahu anhu above him, and Khalid heard the order and stayed on the field, taking his place in the ranks as an ordinary soldier under the man now set over him. When they asked him how he could bear it, he said that he fought for the sake of Allah and not for the sake of Umar. None of it had ever been about his own name, and losing the command took nothing away from the work he had come to do.

What the Companions did together, we are meant to do together now. The community is built to take on the whole of the Deen the way they did, its parts spread across many people, so that when one of us teaches the letters and another teaches the hadith, when one goes out in tabligh and another sits with a man who has never heard the name of the Prophet ﷺ, when one leads the community and another raises its children, someone somewhere is keeping every one of the practices of the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions alive. No one of us keeps the whole of the sunnah, and none of us was ever meant to, because it is the work of a community.

The scholars who came after them settled into the same shape, for the Deen had grown too wide for any one man to master, and so it divided again, into the men of hadith and the men of fiqh, the readers of the Quran and the commentators upon it, those who fixed the language and those who guarded the creed, and the best among them knew better than to imagine that their own field was the whole of the religion. Imam Shafi’i rahimahu-Allah, was an imam in the law, and still he would tell his student Ahmad ibn Hanbal rahimahu-Allah, that Ahmad knew the sound hadith better than he did, and he asked him to name any hadith that was authentic so that he might take it up and act by it, whether it came from Kufa or Basra or Sham. The master of one science sat and learned the other from a younger man, and counted it no loss to his standing. Imam Ahmad, for his part, spent years making du’a for Shafi’i, and when his own son asked him why he praised the man so highly, he compared him to the sun for the day and to health for the body, the kind of thing a person leans on without noticing until it is taken from him.

If the efforts are this diverse, we might start to fear that some of them go to waste, that Allah counts only the work that shows, and He closes that fear off. Of the people of Paradise, He says:

إِنَّ هَٰذَا كَانَ لَكُمْ جَزَاءً وَكَانَ سَعْيُكُم مَّشْكُورًا

“Indeed, this is a reward for you, and your effort has been appreciated.” (Surat al-Insan 76:22)

and of the believer who works for the akhira:

فَأُولَٰئِكَ كَانَ سَعْيُهُم مَّشْكُورًا

“…those, their effort is appreciated.” (Surat al-Isra 17:19)

Our work does not have to be visible to anyone for Allah to count it, because He sees what no one else sees, our efforts, and He appreciates it.

Allah has always taken this service from whoever offered it sincerely, and not only from the men you would expect. In the years around the First World War, a group of scholars from Deoband set out to free India from colonial rule, and because they wrote their plans on pieces of silk and passed them between Kabul and the Hijaz, the effort came to be known as the Reshmi Rumal Movement (Silk Letter Movement), until British intelligence intercepted the letters and broke it apart. The British seized its leader, Shaykh al-Hind Maulana Mahmud Hasan rahimahu-Allah, in the Hijaz and held him for years as a prisoner on Malta, an old scholar far from home who had given up his freedom for the sake of the ummah. Among the men closest to the work was Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi rahimahu-Allah, who had been born into a Sikh family and came to Islam as a young man, and whom Allah then made into one of the movement’s chief planners and sent to Kabul to do what he could. Allah took the service of His Deen from a convert and from a captive scholar alike, because sincerity is the thing He looks for, and the sincere will always find some way to serve the ummah and to give up whatever the giving costs them. The movement failed in every worldly sense, and still their names are spoken with honour a century on, which is how sincere effort tends to go, that Allah records it and people remember it, be it great or small, whether the world called it a success or not.

There is a mercy, too, in the way He shares the work out. He says:

قُلْ كُلٌّ يَعْمَلُ عَلَىٰ شَاكِلَتِهِ

“Say, each works according to his own disposition.” (Surat al-Isra 17:84)

Every servant acts according to his shakila, his make, the temperament and capacity Allah placed in him, so that one of us takes to the patience of teaching children, another to the front of public affairs, another to the long road of tabligh, and another to sitting with people who have never heard. To ask why everyone is not doing the work we happen to value is to ask why Allah did not make us all the same, when the differences are the very thing that gets the whole of the work done, and taking one kind of it away leaves a gap that the rest cannot cover.

Because our strengths differ like this, Allah has laid the reward out to match them, telling us through His Prophet ﷺ that Jannah has many gates, each one named for a deed that people gave their lives to. Abu Hurayra radhi-Allahu anhu, reported that he said:

مَنْ أَنْفَقَ زَوْجَيْنِ فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ نُودِيَ مِنْ أَبْوَابِ الْجَنَّةِ: يَا عَبْدَ اللَّهِ هَذَا خَيْرٌ، فَمَنْ كَانَ مِنْ أَهْلِ الصَّلَاةِ دُعِيَ مِنْ بَابِ الصَّلَاةِ، وَمَنْ كَانَ مِنْ أَهْلِ الْجِهَادِ دُعِيَ مِنْ بَابِ الْجِهَادِ، وَمَنْ كَانَ مِنْ أَهْلِ الصِّيَامِ دُعِيَ مِنْ بَابِ الرَّيَّانِ، وَمَنْ كَانَ مِنْ أَهْلِ الصَّدَقَةِ دُعِيَ مِنْ بَابِ الصَّدَقَةِ

“Whoever spends a pair of anything in the way of Allah will be called from the gates of Paradise, O servant of Allah, this is good. So whoever was of the people of prayer will be called from the gate of prayer, whoever was of the people of jihad will be called from the gate of jihad, whoever was of the people of fasting will be called from the gate of Rayyan, and whoever was of the people of charity will be called from the gate of charity.” Abu Bakr radhi-Allahu anhu, then asked whether anyone would be called from all of those gates at once, and the Prophet ﷺ told him that yes, some would, and that he hoped Abu Bakr would be among them. (Bukhari 1897, Muslim 1027)

The few who are called from every gate stand highest of all, the ones who prayed and fasted and gave and went out and still found room for more, and the Prophet ﷺ hoped Abu Bakr would be one of them. That breadth is the summit, and we are right to want it. The reality is that most of us are called from one gate, or from two, and Allah asks no more of any soul than it is able to give:

لَا يُكَلِّفُ اللَّهُ نَفْسًا إِلَّا وُسْعَهَا

“Allah does not burden a soul beyond its capacity.” (Surat al-Baqara 2:286)

If we cannot do all of it, we do what we can through the gate that is ours, and we leave the other gates to the people made for them, and whatever good we did most becomes the door we come in by.

The Prophet ﷺ set out door after door for us, so that no kind of person would think the way in was closed to him. He reminded us that the one who builds a masjid for Allah, Allah builds him a house in Paradise (Bukhari 450). Of the man who raises two daughters with patience until they come of age, he said that the two of them and he would come on the Day of Resurrection as close as two fingers pressed together (Muslim 2631), a gate standing open for everyone whose work is the tarbiya of the young. He told a gathering that if they would spread the salam among themselves, feed others, keep the ties of kinship, and pray in the night while people slept, they would enter Paradise in peace (Tirmidhi 2485). And he spoke of a man forgiven outright because he climbed down into a well and filled his shoe with water for a dog dying of thirst (Bukhari 2363), so that even the smallest mercy counts for something.

The poor among the Companions once feared the gates were closing on them, and they came to the Prophet ﷺ and said the people of wealth had taken all the reward, praying as they prayed and fasting as they fasted, and then giving in charity and freeing slaves with a surplus the poor did not have. He gave them a door of their own, teaching them words of tasbih and tahmid and takbir to say after each prayer, and when the wealthy heard of it and began to do the same, and the poor came back to say their brothers had caught them up again, he answered:

ذَٰلِكَ فَضْلُ اللَّهِ يُؤْتِيهِ مَنْ يَشَاءُ

“That is the bounty of Allah, He gives it to whom He wills.” (Bukhari 843, Muslim 595)

None of these gates is the only one, so that if you have nothing to give, another stands open for you, and if you give freely, you still have not bought the whole of Paradise with it. No one of us can pass through every gate, and no one is asked to, for Allah made the gates many because He made us different, and it is enough that the ummah between them keeps every gate filled, that among us there are people of prayer and people of fasting, people of charity and people who go out to fight, people who teach the young and people who sit with the stranger, so that no door of Paradise stands empty for the want of someone who made that deed his own. When we insist that our door is the only door, or look down on the gate a brother comes in by, we are quarrelling with the way Allah built the gates.

And if you find, when you look at yourself honestly, that you are doing nothing much at all, you still have one duty left, the smallest of them and the easiest to keep. The Prophet ﷺ was asked what a man should do when he can find no good work within his means, and he named one thing after another until he reached the last of them:

فَلْيَعْمَلْ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَلْيُمْسِكْ عَنِ الشَّرِّ فَإِنَّهَا لَهُ صَدَقَةٌ

“Let him do good and restrain himself from evil, for that is a charity for him.” (Bukhari 1445, Muslim 1008)

The man who adds nothing to the work can at the very least keep his tongue off the people who are doing it. He can refuse to run them down, refuse to sneer at an effort he is not making himself, and that much restraint is written down for him as a charity. Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, the Prophet ﷺ said, should speak good or stay silent (Bukhari 6018, Muslim 47), and there are few better uses of silence than sparing the workers the sound of our complaints.

That is the lesson I wanted to leave with my son, and it is the one I keep having to learn myself. Our efforts are diverse, as Allah said of them, and He asked something of each of us and promised to take it from us all. So bring your part, whatever it turns out to be, and do not weigh it against anyone else’s, because nothing offered to Him sincerely is small, and nothing sincere is ever lost.