7 People Under the Shade of Allah, and the Gift With No Name on It

The 7 people under the shade of Allah are named in one hadith of the Prophet ﷺ: a just ruler, a youth raised in worship, a person attached to the mosques, two who love each other for Allah, one who refuses an illicit call out of fear of Allah, one who gives in secret, and one who remembers Allah alone and weeps (Abu Huraira, Sahih al-Bukhari 660).

We pay for someone's groceries, and by dinner it has become a story, told very modestly, with our eyes on the plate. So how long can we keep a good deed to ourselves?

Abu Huraira narrated that the Prophet ﷺ said:

How many of the seven happen where no one can see?

Each of the seven people in the hadith is described by one act. The notes in brackets below come from the translation, and the rest is our own short reading, offered without any claim to scholarly commentary.

That last act and the secret gift have no human witness, and the refusal may have few.

"The left hand does not know" means a gift kept so hidden that nobody knows how much was given, which is the narration's own gloss. The same teaching appears in Abu Huraira, Sahih Muslim 1031a, where the English has the hands the other way round.

Secrecy in the hadith is about who knows, and the amount isn't mentioned. That matters for anyone who has only a little. The Prophet ﷺ said that Allah takes even one date's worth of charity from honest earnings and enlarges its reward until it becomes as big as a mountain (Abu Huraira, Sahih al-Bukhari 1410). The wording says "a man", as hadith language often does, while Qur'an 2:271 on concealed giving isn't limited to men. Our piece on the daily sadaqa habit goes further into small, regular giving.

Yes, the Qur'an calls concealed charity better for the giver, and it still calls open giving good:

Open giving is called good, and we shouldn't talk ourselves out of it. A friend who hears about a good cause may join in. The verse calls the concealed gift better for the giver, and it ends by saying Allah is aware, which is the whole comfort of giving where no one else is.

The warning sits on the other side. The Prophet ﷺ said, "He who lets the people hear of his good deeds intentionally, to win their praise, Allah will let the people know his real intention (on the Day of Resurrection)" (Jundub, Sahih al-Bukhari 6499). The trouble in that hadith is the wish for praise, and being seen isn't the fault in itself. Questions about zakat and how it's paid are for a qualified scholar.

A secret gift can leave the person who receives it thanking Allah alone. Somewhere today, someone opens a bill they've been dreading and finds it paid. They look at it for a long time. Then they look up and say alhamdulillah, because there's no one else to thank.

The texts don't describe this scene. It's our own picture of what the hadith makes possible. A gift with no name on it spares them the awkward debt of owing us, and it spares us from watching for their gratitude. Our name isn't in the room, and neither is our generosity.

The hard part comes afterwards. With no audience, we're left alone with Allah and with our own reaction. Some of us feel light. Some of us feel a small, ridiculous disappointment, and that disappointment tells us how much we've been leaning on other people's good opinion. Wanting to be thought well of is very human, and we can laugh about it. For more on why this runs so deep, see our piece on ikhlas.

Giving does seem to lift happiness, with one gap that matters here. One well-known paper found that spending more on others predicted greater happiness in a national survey and a field study, and that people randomly assigned to spend on others felt happier than those assigned to spend on themselves.¹ It combined a survey, a field study and a randomised experiment, it was published with a later erratum, and one paper is only one paper.

The gap is that this study wasn't about secrecy. It doesn't tell us whether an anonymous gift feels better or worse than a public one, and we shouldn't borrow it to prove the hadith, which needs no proving. We'd expect the first day of a hidden gift might feel a bit flat, since no one is smiling back at us. The Sunnah's promise is about the Day when there is no other shade, and it says nothing about how Friday will feel.

Giving in secret takes one decision and then a lot of quiet. A way to try it today:

Six other people stand in that shade, and most of what they do also happens without an audience. Which of the seven would we find hardest, if nobody ever knew?