I have found an unidentified brown substance in my butter! I’ll repeat the last bit, my butter! Leave your things in the communal fridge at work and what happens? This:

It’s not toast crumbs, which I generally overlook, it looks a bit more liquidy. Perhaps it’s just HP Sauce and there’s no need to panic but there is always the chance that it’s something a little more sinister like, *shudders*, Marmite!

After an incident at work where I forgot to put my personal plate back into the security of my locker (I arrived the next day and witnessed a colleague munching into his ham and pineapple pizza on my plate), I have been meticulous to hide as many things as is possible out of reach of would-be polluters. But some things, like refrigerator-able items, require a degree of public exposure.

Even at university I recall being a little particular about things like this. A room mate was mid-dive into my margarine tub and paused, a little uneasy about his intended action, “You’re not one of those people who doesn’t like a someone using the same knife for the jam as they do for the butter are you?” “Provided you are adept enough not to leave huge globules of jam in the tub, or chunks of butter in the jam-jar, you’re free to continue without recourse to my wrath.”

I had originally thought about writing a stranger’s guide to surviving the initial five seconds of our first meeting without me mentally denouncing you as a complete idiot or a pathological liar. However, having reflected upon a number of recent incidents, such as:

1) Finding myself standing on my door step in my dressing gown, having a blazing row with the postman (who seems to think that the best way to get the attention of a house’s occupants is to ring the buzzer like you would when wanting to alert all inside to copious amounts of flames and smoke coming out from their windows).

2) A similar incident where a checkout sales clerk in a supermarket let me queue up for ages before deciding to announce that she was closing and that the queue would be cut such that the last person who will get served will be the one in front of me.

I began to think that it’d be whole lot easier to work on myself rather than to attempt to coerce the rest of the world into becoming considerably less annoying. And when a person wants to correct themselves there’s no better example to follow than that of the Messenger of Allāh (sall Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam).

What comes to mind is the story of how the sahābī Zayd bin Su’nah (radiya Allāhu ‘anh) accepted Islām. Rather than cut and paste the lengthy narrations on this I’ll paraphrase the incident. It’s collected in Ibn Hibbān and others; I also found it online here.

Zayd bin Su’nah was a scholar amongst the Jews, he knew from his study of the Tawrah that the prophet the Jews were expecting would be someone who had the characteristic of hilm.

Halīm is often translated as forbearing, mild, tolerant. Hilm is the ability to control your anger; to remain calm when it’s time to be angry; to be able to exercise restraint at a time when it would be justifiable to be upset.

Zayd set about to test the Messenger of Allāh (salla Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam), to see if he possessed this character trait. He had given the Messenger (salla Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) a loan and together they had agreed a date that it should be repaid.

However, two or three days before the loan was due to be repaid, Zayd confronted the Messenger (sall Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) outside the masjid. In front of the sahābah, he grabbed the cloak of the Messenger of Allāh (salla Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) and said “O Muhammad! Why don’t you pay off my due? By Allāh, I know nothing of your family except deferment [on debts]. I know well of your people.”

Wow, look at the combination of bad behaviour here: the loan isn’t due yet; he is doing this in front of everyone; he’s asking for his money in a very harsh manner, physically grabbing clothes; he’s making the accusation that the Messenger (salla Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) is intending to take his money unlawfully and in addition casting aspirations on his family and ascendants as having been career loan-defaulters. Hey, imagine if he’d done such a thing to the Messenger (salla Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) in front of ‘Umar ibn al-Khattāb, can you picture the response he’d get? Oh wait, he did do it in front of ‘Umar and in fact ‘Umar was the first to speak.

“O Enemy of Allah, do you talk to the Messenger of Allah and behave towards him in this manner? By the One who sent him with the truth, had it not been for the fear of missing it (Jannah) I would have beheaded you with my sword!”

And now it’s time to see the reaction of our beloved Messenger (salla Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) who turns to ‘Umar, not to Zayd as you might think, and says: “O ‘Umar, you should have given us sincere counselling, rather than to do what you did! O ‘Umar, go and repay him his loan, and give him twenty Sa’a (measurement of weight) extra because you scared him!”

As ‘Umar lead him away to repay the loan, Zayd identified himself as the scholar of the Jews and explained that he’d acted as he had done in order to test the Messenger of Allāh (salla Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) and was now convinced of his prophethood and promptly took his shahādah.

Subhāna Allāh! That is just a truly amazing reaction, imagine if it’d been you or I who’d been in that situation and how would we have reacted? Say you’re just coming out of a shop and are physically accosted by someone who starts making a scene and shouting about “money owed.” It’s sad to think, but how many of us would have responded equally or more physically ourselves, descended into a tirade of expletives or dived into our pocket grabbed a fistful of change and asked “You want your money?”, then as you hurl the coinage at them, shouted “Here’s your [edit] money!”?

Contrast our own shortcomings with the beautiful character of the Messenger of Allāh (salla Allāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam); for whom the ignorance of the ignorant will not affect him, except that he will become more halīm. As one da’iyah observed we cannot even have hilm with the people closest to us, our own parents, wives or children, so how far removed from us is this part of our character?

With that in mind I intend inshā’ Allāh to embark upon a hilm quest to correct this deficiency I find in myself.

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