The people of uprightness and balance obey Allah and His Messenger to the best of their ability: they fear Allah as much as they can. When the Messenger commands them to do something, they carry out of it what lies within their capacity, and they do not abandon what they have been ordered to perform merely because others engage in what Allah has forbidden. Rather, as Allah the Exalted says, “O you who have believed, take care of your own souls; the one who goes astray will not harm you once you are rightly guided.” (1)

They never assist anyone in disobedience, they do not eradicate an evil with something more evil, and they enjoin what is right only in a manner that is itself right. Thus they remain in the middle ground in most affairs, and for this very reason the Prophet ﷺ, when mentioning the divisions that would afflict his nation, described them as the “saved faction.”

An illustration of this balance is the day of ʿĀshūrāʾ—the day on which Allah honored the Prophet’s grandson, one of the two leaders of the youth of Paradise, by granting him martyrdom at the hands of those wicked reprobates who killed him. It was a calamity—indeed, one of the greatest calamities ever to befall Islam.

Imam Aḥmad and others have narrated—from Fāṭimah bint al-Ḥusayn, who witnessed the killing of her father al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, through her grandfather the Messenger of Allah ﷺ—that he said: “Whenever a person is afflicted by a calamity, then later remembers that calamity—even long after it occurred—and responds to that remembrance with istirjāʿ (saying, ‘Indeed, to Allah we belong and to Him we shall return’), Allah grants him a reward equal to the reward he received on the very day the calamity first befell him.” (2)

It is therefore evident that Allah has decreed that a calamity of such magnitude will continue to be remembered, generation after generation.