Most of you know I don’t place a lot of weight on ahadith. The Qur’an is the Word of God and the only necessary source. Ahadith are nice when they fortify our faith, but so many—even the ones supposedly considered ‘reliable’ that are somehow always narrated by those who hated women—have the opposite effect on faith, in which case they are harmful and should be discounted. I unabashedly pick and choose from ahadith. All Muslims do. Some just pretend they don’t. Some just pretend they look at the “objectivity and virtuosity” of the narrator by evaluating how that narrator treated a horse, but not a woman.

But there is one hadith that I think of often, because although I’m indifferent to it, it is an endless curiosity to me:

Men, do not wear silk or gold. These are for others in this world and for you in the Hereafter. One who wears these in this world will not wear it in the Hereafter.

I borderline discount this and/or am indifferent to it for several reasons. The first is that it’s none of my business. It doesn’t apply to women, who are widely accepted as permitted to wear both in this life. And unlike men’s obsession with hijab, I’ve never felt the need to police the adherence to commands directed at anyone else’s choice of clothing or adornment. Therefore, the subject of how reliable it is isn’t worth much thought from me. So, without much thought, my inclination is that since it appears to forbid what is not mentioned in the Qur’an, even as the Qur’an warns us against doing this, the reliability of the hadith is highly suspicious.

There are a couple of reasons my mind wanders back to this hadith—this hadith that is neither reliable nor relevant to me. The most prominent reason is its logic, which differentiates between what is promised and what is permissible. Although the hadith appears to forbid what is not mentioned in the Qur’an, it follows a logic that is prominent in the Qur’an. Alcohol, for example, is haraam—yet we are promised rivers of it in Paradise. (Honestly I’ve heard alcohol tastes disgusting, so I’ll stick to the water in jannah, but it’ll be nice to finally satisfy the curiosity.) This Qur’anic logic is evident even as outlined in my polygamy article, which emphasizes that we should not think of haraam as translating to forbidden—it translates to sacred. What is sacred can be promised—but impermissible. It can also be promised and permissible.

When I was little, my mother would call me to the iftari table a few minutes before the azaan. There we would wait, sitting patiently in front of our plates, praying quietly, until we received the azaan permitting us to eat. “God asks the angels to behold us during this time,” my mother would say. “God tells the angels, Look at how hungry my servants are—yet look how they await My command.” This was a testament to faith. Breaking the fast is part of Ramadan (promised) but impermissible unless the conditions are met.

This distinction seems extremely obvious. Yet various times in my life, I’ve forgotten it. I’ve known in my intuition, dreams, and bones that something was promised to me by God, and in my torrent desires, I’d conflated promise with permissibility and thus pursued relentlessly. I don’t mean just the ways we are meant to pursue things—like studying for exams or working hard for a raise—because of course, we are meant to still work for what Allah has written for us. No, I mean to extremes. Working without rest. Studying to the brink of forgetting to nourish myself. Becoming generous beyond my resources. I have harmed myself to obtain what was promised, ignoring God’s commands not to harm ourselves. And each and every single time, the path to what is promised becomes more and more obstacled as I sin my way toward it (or really, away from it). It is when I begin to wonder if I must have been mistaken about what is promised, it is when I finally remember to honor my boundaries, that suddenly all obstacles clear, and what is promised falls easily into my hands.

Allah does not reward us for violating our boundaries—does not promise us that for which we have broken our promises.

Regardless of how many times this has happened to me, this principle is one I always forget. I’m forgetting it less now, with age. (It is easier to disrespect yourself in your 20s than in your 30s.) The times I’ve erred this way, I’ve never been aware that I’m sinning. It’s not like telling a lie and accepting that you will answer for it. Instead, it’s always been that I’ve somehow begun to believe that because something is promised, I must be permitted to obtain it at whatever costs, and I cannot possibly sin against myself to get it. The truth of the situation only occurs to me as an afterthought, once I stop believing the thing was promised and conclude I must have been mistaken. That’s the only reason I’ve ever stopped disastrous, self-destructive behavior. Otherwise, if I had been aware, I would have never started it.

And that’s all fine (somewhat) when you’re only harming yourself—

But what about when it concerns others?

What about when it concerns a holy land?

What about when the boundary you’ve violated, the sin you’ve committed, is not your own lack of sleep or meals but the blood on your hands?

I think of this when I see Zionists speaking of how they were promised Palestine, using it to justify the genocide of Palestinians. Fine. Let’s say you were promised. Does it not occur to you it cannot happen with sin? And I think of it again when I hear Jewish people—real, religious Jewish people—say that they were exiled and are not supposed to return to the land they were promised until it is God’s will.

That is how important this principle is.

May we not forget it.