Chapter One: The Diligent Candidate

Four seats in one row, one question paper, and a clock hung above the board that ticks the same tick for all four. The questions do not change with the men sitting under them, and time neither slows for one nor hurries for another. And yet, when the bell is rung and the papers are gathered in, four papers come out and not one of them looks like the others. The difference is not in the examination; the difference is in what each of them did with the minute that passed over all of them alike.

This part has been made into four chapters, and in each chapter a candidate with a name, a way of moving, and a paper. The names are not the names of particular men; they are pores through which the meaning breathes. For when a state of the soul becomes a man who walks and sits and lifts his head, the reader sees it in himself before he sees it in anyone else.

Salim is a candidate nobody notices. He comes into the hall before the bell, sets out two pens and not one, and reads the instructions printed at the head of the paper before he reads the first question. Then he does something people take for a luxury: he divides the time among the questions in pen, in the margin of the paper, so that he knows when to move on and when to stop. He did not come in to sit. He did not come in to study the colour of the walls, the arrangement of the seats, the quality of the light. He came in to write.

The first thing Salim understood is that the examination has a set syllabus, and that effort outside the syllabus is labour that earns no mark. The syllabus in the greater hall is the Book of God and the guidance of His Messenger ﷺ, and he said in his sermon: “The best of speech is the Book of God, and the best guidance is the guidance of Muhammad, peace be upon him. The worst of matters are those newly invented, and every innovation in religion is going astray.” (meaning; Sahih Muslim 867 — Jabir ibn Abd Allah, sound (sahih) — Muslim). So whoever revises from another book, and then comes on the day of the examination with an answer to a question nobody asked, has tired himself out in the wrong place.

The Intention That Turns the Permitted into a Line

Then Salim learned a secret by which he doubles his hours without adding one minute to the day: that a single act is weighed by what stands behind it. Eating is eating, sleep is sleep, and working for your household is working; but let a good intention pass over them, and on his paper they turn from blank space into a written line. Of this the Prophet ﷺ says: “Deeds are judged by the intentions behind them, and every person will have only what he intended.” (meaning; Sahih al-Bukhari 1 — Umar ibn al-Khattab, sound (sahih) — al-Bukhari). So the diligent man does not live two lifetimes; he draws out of one lifetime what nobody else draws out of it, because the scale he is weighed on is not the scale of eyes: “God does not look at your outward forms or your wealth; He looks at your hearts and your deeds.” (meaning; Sahih Muslim 2564 — Abu Hurayra, sound (sahih) — Muslim).

And of the generosity of the One who presides over the greater hall is that the intention is written down before the writing. The candidate who set his mind on the answer and was blocked from it does not come out empty-handed; and there is nothing like this in the examinations of this world, where nothing is counted but ink on paper. The Prophet ﷺ said: “God has written down good deeds and bad ones, and then made the reckoning plain. Whoever intends a good deed and does not do it, God writes it down for him as one complete good deed; and if he intends it and does it, God writes it down as ten good deeds, up to seven hundred times over, and more still. And whoever intends a bad deed and does not do it, God writes it down for him as one complete good deed; and if he intends it and does it, God writes it down as one bad deed only.” (meaning; Sahih al-Bukhari 6491 — Abd Allah ibn Abbas, sound (sahih) — al-Bukhari). On this scale, ease and hardship come out level for the diligent man: if he is given, he is grateful; if he is refused, he endures; and in both cases he adds a line: “How remarkable is the case of the believer! Every turn of his affair is good for him, and that belongs to no one but the believer: if ease comes to him he is grateful, and that is good for him; and if hardship comes to him he endures, and that is good for him.” (meaning; Sahih Muslim 2999 — Suhayb al-Rumi, sound (sahih) — Muslim).

The Way a Stranger Sits

And he has a way of sitting in the hall that can be told at a glance: the way a man sits who knows he is passing through. He hangs no pictures on his seat, and does not make a home of the desk. The Prophet ﷺ said: “Be in this world as though you were a stranger, or someone passing through on a journey.” (meaning; Sahih al-Bukhari 6416 — Abd Allah ibn Umar, sound (sahih) — al-Bukhari). The stranger does not hate the hall, but he never forgets that there is a door he will go out by; and so he does not put off today's work until tomorrow, for he holds nothing of tomorrow in his hand.

And he ﷺ described his own stay in this hall in the truest words ever used of a man passing along a road: “What have I to do with this world? I am in this world only like a rider who shaded himself under a tree, then moved on and left it.” (meaning; Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2377 — Abd Allah ibn Masud, good and sound (hasan sahih) — al-Tirmidhi). Whoever takes that lodging is not pained by a narrow seat or by rough wood, because he knows the room is not his house: “This world is a prison for the believer and a garden for the one who denies.” (meaning; Sahih Muslim 2956 — Abu Hurayra, sound (sahih) — Muslim).

The strangest thing about Salim is that, for all his long effort, he is never easy about what he has written. Every time he fills a line he fears he made a mistake in the line before, so he checks it. This constant checking is what the Prophet ﷺ described when he said: “The shrewd person is the one who calls himself to account and works for what comes after death; and the helpless one is he who lets his own cravings lead him and then counts on God for the rest.” (meaning; Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2459 — Shaddad ibn Aws, good (hasan) — al-Tirmidhi). And Umar ibn al-Khattab — a Companion, and these are his words, not the Prophet's — said: “Call yourselves to account before you are called to account; and make ready for the great presentation. The reckoning on the Day of Rising will be light only for the one who called himself to account in this world.” (meaning; Sunan al-Tirmidhi — Umar ibn al-Khattab, a report stopping at a Companion (mawquf) — not a saying of the Prophet — al-Tirmidhi). Whoever goes over his paper before it is drawn away from him is not taken by surprise by what is in it when it is read out.

And the fruit of all this is not a passing success to be hung on a wall. The diligent man goes out of the hall having left behind him what keeps writing in his paper after he has gone, as the Prophet ﷺ said: “When a person dies, his deeds come to an end except for three: an ongoing charity, knowledge people benefit from, or an upright child who prays for him.” (meaning; Sahih Muslim 1631 — Abu Hurayra, sound (sahih) — Muslim). And set against it is a loss that is nothing like the loss of marks: “Then worship what ye will beside Him. Say: The losers will be those who lose themselves and their housefolk on the Day of Resurrection. Ah, that will be the manifest loss!” (Az-Zumar 39:15, Pickthall).