Hadees 9 — Raḥmat an-Nās wa-l-Bahāʾim — Mercy to People and to Animals رَحْمَةُ النَّاسِ وَالْبَهَائِمِ

1 · Where we are #

• Still in Kitāb al-Adab of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, continuing in book order. You met Mālik ibn al-Ḥuwayrith's twenty nights — the young men who came and stayed, and whom Rasūlullāh ﷺ asked about their families — in Lesson 8.
• One chapter, five ḥadīths.

The five ḥadīths and their Companions:

2 · The chapter heading #

Raḥmat an-nās wa-l-bahāʾim — "Mercy to people and to animals."

Raḥmah is to show mercy; bahāʾim are the livestock and the animals. So the chapter is about behaving mercifully to human beings and to animals alike — and the ḥadīths al-Bukhārī gathers under it are chiefly about the animals' half, which is the half people neglect.

3 · Ḥadīth 1 — the man who watered the thirsty dog #

You met the dog and the cat briefly in Lesson 7; this chapter teaches the ḥadīth in full.

How to read a narrative ḥadīth: this is a report of an incident, and Rasūlullāh ﷺ tells it step by step, so follow it as an event, not as a legal formula.

Baynamā rajulun yamshī bi-ṭarīqin ishtadda ʿalayhi l-ʿaṭash, fa-wajada biʾran fa-nazala fīhā fa-shariba thumma kharaj, fa-idhā kalbun yalhathu yaʾkulu th-tharā mina l-ʿaṭash, fa-qāla r-rajul: laqad balagha hādhā l-kalba mina l-ʿaṭashi mithlu lladhī kāna balagha minnī, fa-nazala l-biʾra fa-malaʾa khuffahu thumma amsakahu bi-fīhi fa-saqā l-kalb, fa-shakara-llāhu lahu fa-ghafara lah.

"While a man was walking along a road a severe thirst came over him. He found a well, went down into it and drank, then came out — and there was a dog panting, eating the moist earth from thirst. The man said: 'This dog has reached the same thirst that had reached me.' So he went down into the well, filled his khuff, held it in his mouth, and gave the dog to drink. Allah thanked him for it, and forgave him."

Clause by clause:

4 · The Companions' question, and fī kulli dhāti kabidin raṭbatin ajr #

"O Messenger of Allah, is there reward for us in the animals too?" — "In every creature with a moist liver there is reward."

• Kull dhāti kabidin raṭbah covers anything alive: an animal, a bird, a human being.
• The reward is attached to the act, not to the recipient's rank. Feed it, water it, relieve it — there is a reward written.
• This is why al-Bukhārī puts the ḥadīth in this chapter: it is his evidence for the bahāʾim half of the title.

5 · Who was the person? — the narrations differ #

• In the wording taught here it is simply "a man" — and the text says only that Allah forgave him; no description of him as a sinner appears at all.
• In other narrations the one who waters the dog is a sinful woman — a prostitute.
• The two are left side by side; neither is chosen over the other.

6 · What the ḥadīth establishes #

1. Kindness to an animal is iḥsān, and it carries reward. Its practical forms: giving an animal water, giving it food, and freeing a bird or animal that is trapped so that it can fly or run again.
2. Mercy to them is a cause for the forgiveness of sins — anna r-raḥmata bihā sababun li-maghfirati dh-dhunūb.
3. Hold the scale. It is astonishing that a single drink of water given to a dog is enough for a man's sins to be forgiven and for him to be admitted to Paradise. That is the point of the ḥadīth — not the dog, and not the water.
4. The chapter reads in both directions. If watering a dog earns that, then tormenting an animal, withholding its food and water, beating it, keeping it in pain is a correspondingly grave sin.

7 · Support — the woman and the cat #

Some people have baulked at this — a woman goes to the Fire over a cat? The scholars' answer: what is being punished is the state of heart the act revealed, the settled cruelty, not the bare arithmetic of one animal.

8 · Sincerity, and al-jazāʾu min jinsi l-ʿamal #

• Allah rewards the deed done for His sake, and accepts a sincere deed even when it is small in people's eyes.
• The maxim al-jazāʾu min jinsi l-ʿamal — the recompense is of the same kind as the deed. In this world the man removed a dog's distress; so his own distress is removed and his sin forgiven. It is a maxim, not a ḥadīth.

9 · Support — the mother bird and her chicks #

Rasūlullāh ﷺ was on a journey, went aside for a need, and someone took the chicks of a bird. The mother was in visible distress, fluttering. He returned and asked, "Who has grieved this one by taking her young?" — and ordered them returned.

10 · The duties of keeping an animal #

• If you keep a sheep, a cow or any animal — whether for qurbānī or for anything else — you must care for it properly, right to the end.
• Do not tie it up and leave it. Its food, its drink, its shelter and its protection are owed to it until the last.
• Do not let it go hungry. Its hunger must not be increased.
• Animal cruelty is a great sin, and it happens among Muslims, out of carelessness. It also gives a bad impression of Islam to those watching.

The wrong is twofold:

The ḥadīth closes on ar-rifq bi-l-ḥayawān — mercy toward animals, toward birds, toward every living thing — and this is foundational teaching, not an optional refinement.

11 · Ḥadīth 2 — the bedouin who confined mercy to two people #

Qāma Rasūlu-llāhi ﷺ fī ṣalātin wa-qumnā maʿah, fa-qāla aʿrābiyyun wa-huwa fī ṣ-ṣalāh: allāhumma rḥamnī wa-Muḥammadan wa-lā tarḥam maʿanā aḥadā. Fa-lammā sallama n-Nabiyyu ﷺ qāla li-l-aʿrābī: laqad taḥajjarta wāsiʿā.

"Rasūlullāh ﷺ stood in a prayer and we stood with him. A bedouin, while in the prayer, said: 'O Allah, have mercy on me and on Muḥammad, and do not have mercy on anyone along with us.' When the Prophet ﷺ had given the salām he said to the bedouin: 'You have hemmed in something vast'" — meaning the mercy of Allah (yurīdu raḥmata-llāh).

What taḥajjarta wāsiʿan means:

• The bedouin narrowed and fenced off a thing that is wide: he asked that mercy be issued to himself and the Prophet ﷺ alone and withheld from everybody else.
• Inna raḥmata-llāhi ʿaẓīmatun wāsiʿah — the mercy of Allah is immense and wide. It is not a fixed sum that runs short if it is shared, and nothing is subtracted from the believers when it reaches others.
• Allah's mercy reaches human beings, animals and birds alike — food, water, provision, the means of life, given out broadly to all of them.
• So the duʿāʾ was corrected, not quietly allowed to pass.

12 · Al-ḥilm — how the correction was made #

The manner of the rebuke matters more than the rebuke itself; this is the half of the lesson to keep.

• Who the man was: an aʿrābī, a bedouin — among a people who were unlettered, who had not been taught, and who did not know what may and may not be said inside the prayer.
• Rasūlullāh ﷺ was soft with him. A Companion would have been angry; he was patient, and corrected the man after the prayer rather than turning on him mid-ṣalāh.
• The parallel is the bedouin who urinated in a corner of Masjid an-Nabawī. The Companions rose at him; Rasūlullāh ﷺ told them to leave him until he had finished, and then to pour a bucket of water over the spot. The reasoning: stopping the man mid-act would have been harder on the man and harder on the masjid than letting him finish.
• The lesson: this gentleness is the Prophet's ﷺ method of teaching, and it is what a teacher and a caller to Islam must copy.

13 · Two points of law from the same ḥadīth #

14 · Ḥadīth 3 — the believers as one body #

Tarā l-muʾminīna fī tarāḥumihim wa-tawāddihim wa-taʿāṭufihim ka-mathali l-jasad, idhā shtakā ʿuḍwan tadāʿā lahu sāʾiru jasadihi bi-s-sahari wa-l-ḥummā.

"You see the believers in their mutual mercy, their mutual love and their mutual sympathy as one body: when one limb complains, the rest of the body rallies to it with sleeplessness and fever."

• These three are the subject of the simile. The body is the picture, not the point.
• When one organ is hurt the whole body takes on its pain: it loses sleep, it runs a fever. The other limbs do not carry on as if nothing had happened — and that is the whole force of the image.
• Applied: when one part of the community is afflicted, the rest must feel it — not as a slogan but as a change in what they do. The ummah does not currently look like this.
• It extends past the community: when relief is owed, you do not sort the afflicted into Muslim and non-Muslim before helping.

15 · Ḥadīth 4 — planting and sowing #

Mā min muslimin yaghrisu gharsan aw yazraʿu zarʿan fa-yaʾkulu minhu ṭayrun aw insānun aw bahīmatun illā kāna lahu bihi ṣadaqah.

"There is no Muslim who plants a planting or sows a sowing, and then a bird or a human being or an animal eats from it, but that it is a ṣadaqah for him."

• The reward is not conditional on who eats it — bird, animal or person — and not on his having intended them to. A bird lands in your garden and eats: that is written for you.
• Against anxiety over loss: a farmer frets when birds take the crop, but on this ḥadīth that portion is not lost — it is converted. What is lost is the money; what is gained is the ṣadaqah.
• The condition is that the earning be lawful and honest. The reward attaches to a legitimate work, not to any work at all.
• It generalises past farming: any lawful occupation that feeds people — the farmer, the trader who moves grain and fruit, the salaried worker — holds up part of the society's life, and can be worship when it is done with that intention. Not everyone can farm, and a community needs all of these.

16 · Ḥadīth 5 — man lā yarḥam lā yurḥam #

Man lā yarḥam lā yurḥam — "Whoever does not show mercy is not shown mercy."

This is the chapter's summary line: everything under raḥmat an-nās wa-l-bahāʾim has been saying this one thing, and here it is said outright.

Support:

Mercy is not a mood, it is how you conduct yourself with whoever is in front of you — someone poorer than you, a neighbour, a patient, an animal, a bird. All of them.

17 · The chapter extended to what grows #

Rasūlullāh ﷺ came as a mercy to all the worlds, and that reaches the trees and the crops too. Do not cut down trees that bear fruit — do not destroy what is feeding people.

18 · No deed too small #

There is no deed so small that it cannot be the cause of a person's sins being forgiven and his entering Paradise. One drink of water, given to a dog, did it.

19 · What to carry out of this lesson #

1. Fī kulli dhāti kabidin raṭbatin ajr — reward is attached to every living thing, not to the worthy ones.
2. The scale is the lesson. A khuff of water given to a dog was enough for forgiveness. Nothing you can do for a creature is too small to count.
3. The chapter cuts both ways — and cruelty to an animal is a twofold wrong: against the creature, and as a maẓlimah that is repaid.
4. Laqad taḥajjarta wāsiʿan — you cannot fence off Allah's mercy, and nothing is taken from you when it reaches someone else.
5. How you correct someone is part of the correction. Let the man finish; then pour the water.
6. Ka-mathali l-jasad — if one part of the body is hurt and the rest sleeps well, it is not one body.
7. Lawful work that feeds people is ṣadaqah while it is being eaten — including by the birds you were annoyed about.
8. Man lā yarḥam lā yurḥam. The whole chapter in four words.