I acknowledge Your favor upon me, and I confess my sin; so forgive me, for no one forgives sins but You.”

Allah, Exalted is He, says: “And who forgives sins except Allah?”—meaning that absolutely no one can pardon sins besides Allah. If the whole community, from its first member to its last, together with Paradise and all the angels, were to gather in order to wipe away a single sin of yours, they would never succeed, for only Allah forgives sins. What we can do is implore Allah to grant forgiveness—for ourselves and for our brothers who have preceded us in faith—but the authority to forgive lies solely with Him.

He, the Exalted, also says: “They do not persist in what they have done while they know.” That is, they do not remain upon their acts of disobedience and wrongdoing once they realize that those acts are indeed sins and injustices. This shows how serious persistence is when one knowingly commits a sin, even a minor one. For that reason many scholars have held that if a person persists in a minor sin, it turns into a major sin.

A striking example is what some ignorant people do today when they shave the beard. They keep removing it and stubbornly persist, regarding it as mere adornment and beauty, whereas in reality it is a blemish and an ugliness; anything that results from disobedience contains no good but is, in fact, repulsive. Those who persist in this sin—even if it was originally small—have erred, for through persistence it becomes a major sin, and we seek refuge in Allah. Such a person shows no concern for his action: every day, whenever he wants to go to the market or to his workplace, he looks in the mirror, and if he notices even a single hair starting to show, you see him