your teacher, or because of your preoccupation with desires or worldly affairs. For the only obedience to anyone that Allah has made obligatory is obedience to His Messenger and adherence to what he brought. Thus, if a servant were to oppose all creation while following the Messenger, Allah would not question him about opposing anyone. For whoever obeys or is obeyed is only to be obeyed in subordination to the Messenger; if he commanded something contrary to the Messenger’s command, he would not be obeyed. Understand this, then: listen, obey, and follow. Do not introduce innovations, lest you become cut off and your deeds be rejected. Indeed, there is no good in any deed cut off from following the Messenger, nor in the one who performs it. And Allah knows best.

As for His words, exalted is He:

“Indeed, We have granted you al-Kawthar.”

This verse indicates an abundant gift from a mighty, self-sufficient Giver of boundless bounty. It also indicates that He, exalted is He, His angels, and His host are with him.

He began the verse with inna (“indeed”), which conveys emphasis and affirms the truth of the statement. The verb appears in the past tense, indicating certainty and that this is an established reality. This is not negated by its indication that the granting of al-Kawthar had already been ordained in the original decree, when the destinies of all creatures were determined fifty thousand years before He created them.

He omitted the noun qualified by al-kawthar (“abundant”), making the expression more emphatically general by leaving it unspecified, and used the adjective instead. That is, He, glorified and exalted is He, said:

“Indeed, We have granted you al-Kawthar.”

He thus described it as abundant. The well-known al-Kawthar is a river in Paradise, as explicitly stated in authentic hadiths. Ibn ʿAbbās said that al-Kawthar is part of the abundant good that Allah granted him. And if the lowest-ranking of the inhabitants of