any toil save the effort of learning it; nor does it need vaults the way money does. Money has to be kept in safes, recorded by accountants, entered into ledgers, and guarded with continual labor, whereas knowledge needs none of that. Its storehouse is your own heart—the treasure chest you carry wherever you go—so you need not fear it being stolen or burned, for it resides within you. In short, knowledge is the greatest blessing Allah bestows upon a human being after Islam and faith. For that reason the Prophet said of the one to be envied: “a man to whom Allah has given wisdom, so he judges by it and teaches it.”

The second person worthy of ghibṭah is a man to whom Allah has granted wealth and empowered him to expend it in the cause of truth—that is, he directs his money to what pleases Allah, never to the unlawful or to idle pursuits, but solely to what wins Allah’s good pleasure. Allah has enabled him to dispose of his wealth rightly, and such a man too is someone to be envied.

We do not envy someone who possesses great riches yet is stingy and derives no benefit from his wealth. On the contrary, we feel sorry for him and say, “Poor fellow! How will he answer on the Day of Resurrection for this wealth—where he obtained it, how he spent it, and how he managed it?” But when we see a man whom Allah has enriched and who spends that wealth in ways that please Allah, we say, “Masha’Allah; this man is to be envied.” We do not envy the person who spends his fortune on palaces, lavish décor, and luxury cars; rather, we say that he is wasteful. If he exceeds proper bounds in his spending, we call him extravagant, and Allah does not love the extravagant.

Likewise, we do not envy someone who uses his wealth to offer prizes for pursuits that bring people no benefit—neither in their religion nor in their worldly life. Some people award prizes for games and the like, activities in which there is no good whatsoever, neither in this world nor in