who owned camels. He came to the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) and said, “O Messenger of Allah, my wife has given birth to a dark-skinned boy, while I am light-skinned and so is she. From where has this dark complexion come?”

The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) asked, “Do you have any camels?”

“Yes,” the man replied.

“What colors are they?”

“They are reddish-brown.”

“Are there any among them that are dappled gray”—meaning black mixed with white?

“Yes,” he said.

“So how did that color come about?”

“Perhaps a vein has asserted itself,” he answered, that is, some ancestor farther back may have had that color and the trait has re-emerged.

The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “Then it may be that the same has happened with your son: a vein has asserted itself.” Perhaps one of the boy’s grandfathers, grandmothers, maternal uncles, or other forebears was dark-skinned, and the child has inherited that trait. The Bedouin was entirely satisfied. Had the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) offered him an abstract explanation, the man—being a desert Arab unfamiliar with such discourse—might not have understood; but by giving him an example taken from his own daily life, he left fully convinced.

Thus the student of sacred knowledge, and indeed every teacher, should make intangible meanings accessible to people’s minds by striking concrete examples, just as the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) did.

This ḥadith also affirms the validity of drawing lots, for it is sanctioned in two places in the Book of Allah and in six narrations of the Prophet’s Sunnah. The first Qur’anic instance is in Surah Āl ʿImrān: “You were not with them when they cast their pens to decide which of them would be the guardian of Mary, nor were you with them when they disputed” (Āl ʿImrān 3:44). The second occurs in Surah al-Ṣāffāt