Anchored

Some hadith are hard to read and understand the first time around.

One of them is the authentic narration in Bukhari and Muslim where the Prophet ﷺ says, “I was commanded to fight the people until they testify that there is no god but Allah.” Read alone, it can sound like an order of endless war against non-Muslims. The scholars who explained it read it a different way. In this hadith, “the people” refers to the pagan Arab tribes who broke treaty after treaty at the end of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission, not to all of humanity. The Qur’an sets peace as the default (“if they incline to peace, incline to it as well”). The Prophet ﷺ made treaties with non-Muslims and lived beside them in Medina. He also said to leave the Abyssinians and the Turks alone as long as they left the Muslims alone. In Islamic law, the justification for war is always protective. Its rules shield non-combatants, women, children, clergy, animals and even trees, and a promise of safety holds even when an eight-year-old gives it.

Hadith 9 of Imam al-Nawawi’s forty asks something closer to home. Why does the Prophet ﷺ tell us to avoid what he forbids completely, but to do what he commands “as much as you can”? Avoiding something takes no money and no strength, only will, so it is within everyone’s reach. Plenty of people do good deeds. Staying away from what Allah forbids is what sets a God-conscious person apart. The same hadith warns about questions asked to dodge an obligation, to trip someone up, or to look pious, like the man who asked Ibn ‘Umar about the blood of fleas. In this episode of Anchored: The 40 Hadith for Today’s Muslim, Sh. Mohammad Elshinawy explains what jihad really means in the Islamic tradition, how Islam’s ethics of war compare with other civilizations, and why closing the gap between what you know and what you do matters more than gathering another answer.

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