seek refuge in Allah from being great in my own estimation yet insignificant in His sight. Never has a mission of prophethood come to an end without passing through successive stages until its last outcome becomes mere kingship. You will soon come to know and put to the test the rulers who follow after me (1).

In the Musnad there is a report narrated by Ḥammād ibn Salamah, from al-Jurayrī, from Ḥakīm ibn Muʿāwiyah, from his father, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:

“You are the last of the nations and the most honored of them before Allah. The space between the two leaves of one of the gates of Paradise is a journey of forty years, yet a day will surely come when it will be packed to bursting.”

Al-Bayhaqī transmitted the same ḥadīth through ʿAlī ibn ʿĀṣim (2), from Saʿīd al-Jurayrī, from Ḥakīm ibn Muʿāwiyah, but with the wording: “a journey of seven years” (3).

Yaʿqūb ibn Sufyān said: “Al-Faḍl ibn al-Ṣabbāḥ, Abū al-ʿAbbās, narrated to us; Maʿn ibn ʿĪsā narrated to us; Khālid ibn Abī Bakr ibn ʿUbayd Allah ibn ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿUmar narrated to us, from Sālim ibn ʿAbd Allah, from his father, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:

‘The gate through which my community will enter Paradise is as wide as the distance a skilled rider covers in three days, yet they will be compressed within it until their shoulders nearly dislocate.’”

Al-Tirmidhī also recorded this report from the narration of that same Khālid, then remarked: “I asked Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī about this ḥadīth; he did not recognize it and said, ‘Khālid ibn Abī Bakr reports objectionable narrations from Sālim’ (5).”

Al-Bayhaqī commented: “The ḥadīth of ʿUtbah ibn Ghazwān with the wording ‘forty years’ is more reliable.”

ʿAbd ibn Ḥumayd relates in his Musnad—through al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā al-Ashyab, from Ibn Luhayʿah, from Darrāj, from Abū al-Haytham, from Abū Saʿīd—that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:

“Indeed, the space between the two leaves of a gate in Paradise is the distance of a forty-year journey” (6).

As for the ḥadīth of Laqīṭ ibn ʿĀmir, in which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: “Hell has seven gates; between no two of them does a rider travel less than seventy years,” and in which he likewise spoke of the distance between the gates of Paradise—this is a well-known ḥadīth (7). Some scholars understood it to refer to the distance from one gate to the next, not to the span between the two leaves of a single gate.