Preventing Evil With Your Hands, Tongue, and Heart

  

Preventing Evil with Your Hand, Tongue, and Heart

M. Bakri Musa

September 27, 2026 

 

Excerpted from my Qur’an, Hadith, And Hikayat: Exercises In Critical Thinking (2021)

 

The central imperative of the Qur’an is amr ma’ruf nahi munkar—enjoining good and forbidding evil. A well-known prophetic tradition maps out its execution in clear, pragmatic terms: when you witness an injustice, stop it with your hand. If that is beyond your capacity or would put you in harm’s way, speak out against it. If even that proves too risky, detest it in your heart—though, as the tradition notes, that represents the absolute baseline of faith.

Other hadith broaden our understanding of what constitutes “good.” Consider the story of the prostitute granted Paradise simply for fetching water in her shoe for a dog dying of thirst. On any conventional moral scale, her livelihood placed her at the margins of respectable society. Her redemption seemed an uphill climb. Yet a single act of compassion toward an animal—one often viewed with theological unease in traditional circles—erased a lifetime of transgression. It is a striking reminder of divine grace, but also a call to look beyond superficial piety.

Then there is the man admitted to Paradise for removing a thorn from a public path. If such a minor act of civic consideration earns so immense a reward, consider the ultimate value of modern, tangible contributions: the engineer who designs a reliable bridge allowing rural farmers to bring their crops to market, or families to transport a sick child to the hospital.

This brings to mind Martin Luther’s observation that a Christian cobbler demonstrates his faith best not by carving crucifixes into the leather, but by crafting sturdy, affordable shoes that the poor could afford. Likewise, a Muslim engineer does not honor God by inscribing intricate calligraphy on a bridge’s arches. He honors Allah by getting his stress-strain calculations right, understanding soil mechanics, and specifying the proper grade of concrete so the structure does not collapse under a heavy truck or a seasonal flood. To skimp on math while multiplying public prayers is not piety—it is criminal negligence posing as virtue.

I recently watched an exposition on this topic by the American scholar Yasir Qadhi. He drew on an old theological parable about a group that admonished their neighbors for violating Sabbath restrictions, while a third group stood by, asking why anyone should care what others did. Though rooted in an ancient Israelite context, the lesson translates directly: Qadhi argued that amr ma’ruf is a collective responsibility through which a community signals its core values. Without it, a society slides into moral indifference. Unable to resist a standard ideological detour, he added: “As with modern Western society.”

For Qadhi, failing to observe ritual obligations is the ultimate “bad,” and publicly reprimanding people for it is “commanding good.”

We see this same obsession with ritual policing in Malaysia. In Kelantan, vans equipped with blaring loudspeakers patrol the streets before Friday prayers, warning adult males to assemble at the mosque. Religious enforcement officers follow behind, canes in hand. They are literally applying the Hadith—using the tongue (amplified by electronics) and the hand (reinforced by a stick) to enforce compliance.

Attending Friday prayers is undoubtedly a meaningful spiritual act for a Muslim, though it carries no moral weight for a non-Muslim or an atheist. But has our religious bureaucracy lost all sense of proportion? Praying in congregation may be superior, but praying at home is hardly a moral failure. Yet under the logic of our zealots, falling short of the “ideal” is instantly criminalized as “evil.”

This distorted hierarchy of values became glaringly obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many expressed outrage over the temporary closure of mosques. They failed to grasp a foundational principle of Islamic jurisprudence:  the preservation of human life (hifz al-nafs) takes absolute precedence over communal ritual.

When a society elevates the enforcement of outward rituals over critical thinking, professional competence, and the protection of human life, it has fundamentally lost its way. True amr ma’ruf is not found in brandishing a cane on Friday afternoon; it is found in building safe bridges, protecting public health, and treating every living creature with basic dignity.

Next: Harm Reduction versus Doing Good