and they benefit others and themselves. Yet those who did accept the truth divide into two groups.

The first group is made up of people to whom Allah grants understanding (fiqh); they draw legal judgments from the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger ﷺ and then teach them.

The second group consists of narrators who lack that depth of insight. They can recite a hadith, relate it, and preserve it, but they possess no juristic discernment. Such narrators are countless—how many transmitters of hadith merely serve as containers from which others take! It is the jurists who actually distribute the water and bring benefit to the people.

So there are two useful classes: one that has memorized, comprehended, and internalized the divine law, then taught it and extracted numerous rulings from it—these resemble land that absorbs the rain and produces plentiful herbage and pasture; and another that only conveys reports, passing on hadith without truly grasping much of it—these are like land that holds the water so people can draw from it and drink. From such narrations scholars later derive rulings that benefit humanity.

The third category is land that gains nothing from the downpour—flat, barren stretches that neither retain water nor grow any vegetation. These people contain no good: they take no advantage of Allah’s revelation and pay it no heed—Allah’s refuge is sought from that. They deny the reports and scorn the commandments; they are the worst of all. We ask Allah for safety.

Examine yourself, then: which of the three types of land are you? Are you the soil that absorbs the water and produces pasture and herbage, the second type of land, or—Allah forbid—the third?