Two people each give ten dollars. One of them has eleven dollars in his pocket. The other one owns a million. 

Whose ten dollars does Allah appreciate more? 

You already know the answer. That is not the hard part. The hard part is that there is no ledger anywhere you can open to find out where your own ten dollars landed. 

That is where the closing ayat of Surah Al-Hajj take us. 

You Do Not Get the Ticket at the Light 

To Allah alone, all matters are taken back and evaluated.¹ 

You run a red light and there is a camera on it, sometimes with a flash. 

You do not get the ticket right away. What you did was recorded, the information went to the department of motor vehicles, some clerk looked at it and put a price on it and then mailed it to you. Your actions are not punished on the spot. They are stored, then evaluated by somebody who prices them. 

What we do every day is recorded too. You just do not see a flash go off. The angels are busy writing and writing and they have shifts. They switch, they report to Allah and the next one takes over. Allah does not just look at what we do. He evaluates. What was this deed worth? 

Not all of our prayers are worth the same. Everybody here is sitting together, but not everybody is going to be rewarded the same for sitting here. He evaluates the quality, not just the quantity and only He can know that. Everybody made wudu, but some got more score for it than others. 

Everybody gave ten dollars. Some got rewarded a lot more, because all they had was eleven and they still gave ten. Somebody else owns a million bucks and gave ten. Quantitatively the donations are the same. Whose does Allah appreciate more? It was a huge sacrifice for the one who had eleven. 

You all came here from different distances and Allah takes the effort into account. People never can. I look at a crowd of you and I have no idea who is making what kind of effort. For me, all of you are just attendees. But maybe for one of you this is the first time you have spent three whole hours without your device. That person gave up an addiction and it hurt and they still did it. That might be worth a great deal to Allah. 

Even the angels cannot fully evaluate what you do. They cannot look inside your heart. The intention, the motivation, the amount of faith in there, only Allah knows that. Which is where the hope is. If nobody appreciates what I do, Allah does. 

Now Ask Nuh (AS) for a Progress Report 

Nine hundred and fifty years. Can anybody remember what happened in the last nine hundred and fifty years? That is one man’s work. A handful of people accept Islam. A handful. 

Look at people who make sales, or even churches. They have charts. This year we converted this many people, we served this many villages, we took this many Muslims out of the fold of Islam. Progress reports, always with an upward incline. 

Now ask Nuh (AS) for a year-by-year progress report. How many people accepted Islam? This year, nobody. The last ten years? No one. The last fifty? One person. The last hundred? Still that same person. Two hundred years? Two people. How is it going at home? Your wife? No. Your son? No. 

Is there progress? No. Is it valuable to Allah? In the eyes of everyone else it is a failure. In the eyes of Allah it is valuable. 

There could be someone speaking before a million people and someone else sitting somewhere talking to one child and maybe what that one person is doing with that one child is worth more to Allah than what the guy on stage is doing. Value is in the hands of Allah. 

Two Guys, a Box of Pizza and an Empty Room 

Sometimes you hold an event and nobody shows up. Let me tell you a story. The first MSA event I went to, I did not want to go to. I was in another club, the Pakistan club, whose job was to set up the parties and I was getting ready to run for president, because I had the most connections with DJs. 

So this guy walks by with a beard and puts a flyer up that says Muslim Students Association. Muslims from every country? Their parties must be way bigger. Forget this PSA business, I am doing MSA. I had no idea it had anything to do with Islam. 

So I asked him: you guys party, right? He goes, yeah, party. You should come, it is amazing. Then he walked away. 

I skipped my presidency bid and went to the meeting. There is that guy, there is another guy, there is a box of pizza in an empty room and that is all there is. There is a stack of a hundred unused flyers and they are sitting there talking. Yeahman, I guess nobody shows up. 

I walk in and think maybe I am in the wrong place and I want to turn around and leave. No no no, wait, wait, just have some pizza at least. I cannot say no to fresh pizza. So I sat down and two minutes turned into an hour. I became friends with these guys. One of them had a really nice car and I used to take the subway home holding on for dear life for forty-five minutes, so when he offered to drop me home, that was sweet. 

Eventually that one friend, the guy with the car, is the reason I started praying. 

Everything that has happened in my life until here is because of that pizza meeting. Everything I try to do, everything this organization tries to do, all of it goes down to those two guys holding a meeting nobody came to and him saying yeah, we party, dude, we party hard. 

They have a share in everything I do. They get equal reward, actually, according to the hadith. I think to myself, subhanAllah. You will never know the worth of the smallest thing. 

A Plastic Horse on Two Poles 

There is a brother I know. How many people’s lives has that one man changed? I told him when I first met him: you are in this position, I can tell. Allah wants a lot of people’s lives to change because of you. 

That is true. I go to Qatar, Bahrain, Malaysia, Singapore, anywhere at all. People say: how is he? Make du’a for him. He has changed my life. 

Who would think it of a guy out in Texas. 

It is so out there that their idea of an exotic building is a bunch of poles with a plastic horse on top, in the middle of a field. That is the city monument. The most exotic store there is Justin Boots, with gigantic cowboy boots sticking out both sides of the sign. 

One human being in that place can be a source of iman and tawbah and gratitude for millions of people all over the world. People have taken shahada watching that stuff. Then imagine their children and their children. How many scholars will come from that? Just because one person. 

You might think a deed is nothing, completely insignificant. It might turn into the thing that changes the map of the world. What the work is worth is not in the hands of Facebook or YouTube. It is not in the hands of numbers and figures and dollar amounts. He can take something completely off anybody’s radar and make it the most valuable and take something so popular and so well known and make it worthless. It all depends on our sincerity. 

Bow. Then Fall Down. 

Now that Allah has said He evaluates the deeds, He calls us to action. O you who have iman: bow and prostrate.² 

That is part of your salah, is it not? Why not just say pray? If He said pray it would have included standing. He broke it up, because He is drawing our attention to something specific. 

When you make ruku, you have humbled yourself before Allah. You know when someone is exhausted after a marathon? You see what those people do, because they are exhausted. We do not have power left and our expression of powerlessness is going into ruku. 

But someone who does not even have the strength to stand collapses on the ground. What do we do? We collapse on the ground. We go from one stage of humility to a greater one. Sajdah is the lowest position you can be in. You cannot be lower. 

So Allah says that in this position you might learn what it means to be a slave to your Master. The lowest possible job anybody can have is a slave and there you are, in the lowest position a body can take. 

Slavery to Allah is not limited to sujud. When you come out of sujud you come out of salah and there are a few hours until the next one. In those hours, that sajdah should remind you that you are still a slave. 

When you are praying, you are completely under control. You stand a certain way, you are not looking around, you do not say anything Allah does not want you to say. Somebody comes and starts talking to you in the jama’ah. Do you go, hold on a second? No. You pretend they do not exist. You keep praying. For those few minutes I do not even have the power to say hold on a second, I am praying. 

This is why Allah says, no doubt about it, the prayer prevents you from shameless things and evil things.³ Prayer trains you to be in slavery outside of prayer. If your prayer is not doing that for you, maybe you do not know yet what that means.

Do Good, But Not Before You Have Been Flattened 

Slavery is the ultimate form of humility and that is where you would think it ends. It does not. Allah says: do the good. The word also means the best. Do the best. 

What in the world is Allah talking about? Khayr is actually done for others. What He is teaching us here is that now that you have become My slave, now that you have completely humbled yourself, you are ready to serve people. 

You cannot serve people until you have been humbled. 

I am teaching you right now. In one sense I am your older brother. In another sense I am your servant. I am not in a position of leadership more than I am in a position of service and I am honored to serve you. I am not better than you because I know some things you might not. Maybe some of you are far more knowledgeable than I am. 

Because if I truly have a relationship with Allah, the one thing that comes out of that relationship of slavery is humility. What is a slave if he is not humble? A slave has no position to be arrogant from. What is he going to be proud of? 

MSA volunteers are not better than the people they serve. You are the president of your masjid, you are the most humble servant of all of them. The CEO, the imam, the scholar. We are all servants and we are supposed to be the examplesof humility. 

This session sits near the end of the course and the sections before it build the framework it depends on. Study Quran Passages with Ustadh Nouman Ali Khan on Bayyinah TV: Bayyinah TV 

Notes 

This post is adapted from session forty-eight of Quran Passages on Bayyinah TV and is written in the voice of that session. Every teaching claim, example and aside in it is taken from the session itself. The references below locate the ayat it works on, in the order it walks them.

[1] Al-Quran, Surah Al-Hajj, 22:76, https://quran.com/22/76 

[2] Al-Quran, Surah Al-Hajj, 22:77, https://quran.com/22/77 

[3] Al-Quran, Surah Al-‘Ankabut, 29:45, https://quran.com/29/45