This, too, is an act of charity: that you help a man with his mount—lifting him onto it when he cannot mount by himself, or loading his belongings onto it. Such assistance is charity.

Likewise, removing harm from the road is charity; meaning that if you see something that could hurt pedestrians, you remove it. That removal is charity, whether the object is a stone, a shard of glass, a strip of watermelon rind, some twisted cloth, or anything of that sort.

In short, whatever harms people, take it off the path and you will have given charity. Conversely, if removing harm from the road is charity, then throwing harm onto the road is a sin.

Among the wrongdoers are those who dump their rubbish in the middle of the street, or let water flow through the marketplaces so that it inconveniences people. Letting water run unchecked involves another evil as well: it depletes the stored supply, for water is kept in reserve in the earth. Allah the Exalted says, “We sent down water from the sky and gave it to you to drink, but it is not you who store it” [al-Ḥijr 15:22]. What is stored can run out.

For this reason, anyone who leaves water running and squanders it, heedless of the waste, is harming the entire ummah, because water is a shared resource. If you misuse it and spend it carelessly, you are guilty of extravagance—and Allah does not love the extravagant—and you endanger the community by threatening its water supply through reduction or loss. That is a public harm.

To sum up: those who cast harmful objects along the walkways and in the markets are doing wrong, whereas those who remove them are earning charity.

The Prophet ﷺ said, “Removing harm from the road is charity, and a good word is charity.” Praise be to Allah, this hadith is all-embracing. The “good word” falls into two categories: one that is good in and of itself, and one that is good because of the end it serves.