Muslim children should not underestimate the danger of
small sins and should not persist in doing them. The Prophet
(peace and blessings be upon him) said to 'A’ishah, “O
A’ishah, beware of the small sins.” (Narrated by Ibn Majah).
The small sins are those that man thinks are too unimportant
for him to be punished for, but when they come together they
destroy man. The small sin may develop to be a big sin for
many reasons. Among them is persisting in doing it. The
small sin is not small any more if one persists in doing it, and
the big is not big any more if one asks Allah’s forgiveness
after committing it.
A big sin that is done once is more likely to be forgiven
than a small sin that is done repeatedly. Imagine a big rock
with drops of water falling repeatedly on it. Surely they will
affect it more than a big flow of water pouring on it at one
time. This idea — that the effect of the small continuous thing
is greater than the big thing that comes once — is clear even
with good deeds. The best deeds are those that are constant,
even if they are small. The Prophet (peace and blessings be
upon him) warned us against the small sins saying, “Beware
of the small sins. The similitude of small sins is that of a
group of people who descended into a valley and each one of
them brought one straw till they had enough straws to set a
fire and bake their bread. The small sins destroy the one who
does them.” (Narrated by Ahmad).
Another warning by the Prophet (peace and blessings be
upon him) is, “Satan has despaired of making idols worshiped
in the land of the Arabs, but he has satisfied himself by the
small sins that you do. The small sins are considered major on
the Day of Judgment. When one is taken for many small sins,
he gets destroyed by them.” (Narrated by At-Tabarani). The
Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) also said, “If the
servant of Allah makes a mistake, it scratches a black spot in
his heart. If he refrains from doing it and asks Allah’s
forgiveness, his heart will be polished again. But if he goes
back to it, his whole heart will be covered with a black stain,
which Allah mentions in the Qur’an by saying ^No indeed!
But their own deeds have rusted upon their hearts) (Surat Al-
Mutaffifin 83: 14).” (Narrated by At-Tirmidhi).
Whenever a person commits sins, those sins pile up on
one another till they cover his heart completely. The Prophet
(peace and blessings be upon him) wanted to illustrate this
danger of the small sins in a practical way. On the day Allah
granted His Messenger victory in the Battle of Hunain, he
(peace and blessings be upon him) sat down with his
Companions in a desert place. He told them, “Gather anything
that you may find, whether a bone or a tooth or anything.”
After an hour they gathered things and piled them before the
Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), who said, “Can
you see this? This is the way sins accumulate in someone.
Every one of you should fear Allah and stop committing
either small or big sins. They all count on a person.”
Allah the Exalted revealed to one of His prophets:
“Don’t look at the smallness of the present, but look at the
greatness of the One Who gave it to you; and don’t look at the
smallness of the sin, but look at the greatness of the One you
sinned against (Allah).” In the same manner, Anas ibn Malik
used to say to the people after the death of the Prophet (peace
and blessings be upon him), “You do bad things that appear in
your eyes smaller than a hair, but at the time of the Prophet
(peace and blessings be upon him) we used to consider them
major sins.” (Narrated by Ahmad). This shows that what we
consider as a trivial mistake was considered as a major sin at
the time of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) and
his Companions.
The believer regards his sin to be a big mountain that is
about to fall on his head, but the hypocrite looks at his sins as
he looks at a fly that sits on his nose and he shoos it away.
Here -appears the importance of knowledge: the common man
transgresses the limits that the knowledgeable cannot
transgress. The more one knows, the more one estimates well
the magnitude of his sin. Sometimes one is so ignorant that he
may shamelessly boast about his evil deed, like a merchant
who publicly boasts, “Don’t you see how 1 managed to fool
the customer and took his money in return for defective
goods?” Or a girl may be proud to have hurt her friend saying,
“Do you see how 1 spread all her secrets and scandalized her
till she was put to shame?” And there are many other
examples of big sins that people think in their ignorance are
small.
There is the story of the Companion Abud-Darda’. He
entered his house one day with his head lowered and his face
covered with grief. His wife asked him what was wrong. He
answered her, “By Allah, 1 can’t recognize anything of
Muhammad’s commands in the people except that they all
pray. It this is the condition at the time of the Companions
fourteen centuries ago, what about nowadays?
Bilal ibn Sa id said, “Don’t think of how small your sin
is, but think of how great the One you sinned again: ,
The pious wife should always encourage her husband in
matters relating to this life and the life to come. There is the
example of a woman who used to pray one hundred rak ahs
every day and night and she was always telling her husband,
“Stand up and pray, till when are you going to be that
careless?” And when he went to his work she used to say to
him, “Swear to me that your profit will always be of a halal
source." And she used to hold his hand and tell him, “Swear
to me that you don't do anything for me that might lead you to
enter the Hell-fire. Go and visit your mother and your family,
and never sever your relationship with them.” Look at today's
wives and husbands and how they do not care about either big
or small sins but commit them publicly.
A child should not underestimate the small mistakes so
that he does not fall into the big ones.
