He also said:

“Keep yourself patiently with those who call upon their Lord.”

When one of the poor asked the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, for something he was unsuited to undertake, he forbade him to do so. He said:

“O Abū Dharr, I consider you weak, and I love for you what I love for myself. Do not take command over even two people, nor assume responsibility for an orphan’s property.”

Rich and poor were on an equal footing in their seating in his presence, in the rows behind him, and in other matters. Whenever any of them possessed particular merit, the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, acknowledged that merit, as when he supplicated for the seventy Quran reciters. He would sit with the people of the Suffa—the shaded platform. Yet ‘Uthmān, Talha, al-Zubayr, Sa‘d ibn Mu‘ādh, Usayd ibn al-Hudayr, ‘Abbād ibn Bishr, and other wealthy leaders among the Muhājirūn and Ansār also enjoyed a standing that others among the poor did not have.

This is how the balanced imams treated the rich and the poor. This is the justice and equity brought by the Quran and Sunnah. It was the way of ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azīz, al-Layth ibn Sa‘d, Ibn al-Mubārak, Mālik, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and others in their dealings with the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor.

Among the imams, however, were those such as al-Thawrī who favored the poor and were biased against the wealthy, exercising their judgment and seeking Allah’s pleasure thereby. Near the end of his life, he was reproached for this and abandoned that approach.