Gardens of the Righteous — Page 261
RIYADH AS-SALIHIN 261 proceeded till we came to a garden which was full of spring flowers and in the midst of the garden was a man so tall that I could not see his head as if it was hidden in the sky and around him were so many children as I had never seen before. I asked my companions: Who are these? And they said: Proceed, proceed; and we proceeded and arrived at a tree so enormous that I had not seen any so big nor so beautiful and my companions asked me to climb it and we all climbed and we beheld a city which was built of gold and silver bricks laid alternately. We came to the gate of the city and asked for the gate to be opened and it was opened for us and we entered and we saw therein people one half of whose bodies was the most beautiful that you could imagine and the other half the most ugly. There was a stream flowing through the middle of the city the water of which was pure white. My companions said to the people:. Go and plunge into the stream. They did so and when they returned to us their ugliness had disappeared and they became wholly beautiful. My two companions said to me: This is the Garden of Eden and that is your residence. . I raised my eyes and beheld a palace like a white cloud and they repeated:. That is your residence. I said to them: May Allah bless you both, now let me enter it. They said: Not just yet but you will certainly enter it. . I said to them: I have witnessed many strange things this night. What is the meaning of that which I have seen? They said to me: We shall now tell you. . The first person that you saw whose head was being smashed with a stone was one who had committed the Quran to memory and then forgotten it and neglected the prescribed Prayers. The person whose mouth and nostril and eye were ripped open to the neck was one who ran about from his home spreading forth lies which circulated through the world. The men and women in the oven were adulterers and adulteresses. The man you saw swimming in the stream being stoned was one who earned money by way of interest. The ugly man starting the fire was the guardian of hell. The very tall man in the garden was. Abraham and the children around him were those who had died in their natural state. (Some of those around the Holy Prophet asked him: Messenger of Allah, would the children of the idolators be included among them? The. Holy Prophet said: Yes, and the children of the idolators also). Those who were half handsome and half ugly were people who had mixed righteous conduct with evil and Allah forbore from them (Bokhari). . Another version is: I saw last night two men who took me to the Holy Land (and the account proceeds as in the version above and continues:) We arrived at a pit like an oven the upper part of which was narrow and the lower was wide and there was fire raging inside it. As the flames rose the inmates also rose till they were about to emerge from it and when the flames went down they went down with them. There were men and women in it, all naked. Then we arrived at a stream flowing with blood and with a man standing in the middle of it and another one on the bank with a heap of stones in front of him. . The one in the middle wanted to get out of the stream but when he tried to get out the one on the bank struck him with a stone on his face which pushed him