raise my head. I then look before me, behind me, to my right, and to my left, and I recognize my community amid all the other nations.”
A man asked, “O Messenger of Allah, how will you recognize your community among the nations that stretch from Noah to your own?”
He replied, “I shall know them: they will be radiant, their limbs gleaming from the traces of wuḍūʾ (ablution)—a mark possessed by no other nation. I shall know them because they will be given their records in their right hands. I shall know them by their distinguishing marks and by their faces. And I shall know them by their light that will run before them and before their offspring.”
Ibn Abī Ḥātim said:
[My father narrated to us]; ʿAbdah ibn Sulaymān narrated to us; Ibn al-Mubārak narrated to us; Ṣafwān ibn ʿAmr narrated to us; Sulaym ibn ʿĀmir told me:
“We once went out for a funeral at the Bāb of Damascus, accompanied by Abū Umāmah al-Bāhilī. After the funeral prayer had been offered and they began the burial, Abū Umāmah said:
‘People! Morning and evening you dwell in a house where good deeds and misdeeds are apportioned among you, and soon you will depart from it to another house’—he pointed to the grave—‘the house of solitude, the house of darkness, the house of worms, the house of constriction—except for what Allah, exalted is He, makes spacious. Thereafter you will move on to the stations of the Day of Resurrection. While you are in one of those stations, a command from Allah will overtake mankind: faces will become bright, and faces will become dark. Then you will pass to another station where a deep darkness will envelope the people. Next the light will be distributed: the believer will receive light, whereas the disbeliever and the hypocrite will receive nothing. This is the parable Allah has given in His Book: “And for anyone to whom Allah has not assigned a light, he has no light at all” (al-Nūr 24:40). The disbeliever and the hypocrite will not benefit from the believer’s light, just as a blind man gains no sight from the eyesight of one who sees. The hypocrites will say to those who believe, “Wait for us that we may borrow some of your light!” It will be said, “Go back and seek a light for yourselves” (al-Ḥadīd 57:13). That is the deception of Allah with which He deceives the hypocrites, as He said: “They seek to deceive Allah, but it is He who deceives them” (an-Nisāʾ 4:142). They will return to the place where the light was divided but will find nothing; they will come back to the believers, and a wall will be set up between them which has a gate—“inside it is mercy, but outside, facing it, is torment …” (al-Ḥadīd 57:13).’
Sulaym ibn ʿĀmir added, ‘The hypocrite will go on being deluded until the light is apportioned and Allah distinguishes between believer and hypocrite.’ (1)
Ibn Abī Ḥātim also said:
[My father narrated to us]; Yaḥyā ibn ʿUthmān narrated to us; Abū Ḥaywah narrated to us; Arṭāh ibn al-Munḏhir narrated to us; Yūsuf ibn al-Ḥajjāj narrated from Abū Umāmah, who said:
‘A darkness will be loosed on the Day of Resurrection; no believer or disbeliever will be able to see his own hand until Allah sends light to the believers in proportion to their deeds. The hypocrites will follow them and will say to the believers, “Wait for us that we may borrow some of your light!”’ (2)
Al-Ḥasan and Qatādah, commenting on the verse, “So a wall will be set up between them which has a gate: inside it is mercy and outside facing it is torment” (al-Ḥadīd 57:13), said, ‘It is a barrier between Paradise and Hellfire.’ Ibn Aslam said, ‘It is the very wall to which Allah referred…’