Compassion in Action: What Rabi al-Awwal Teaches Us About Mercy

Every year during Rabi al-Awwal, the same handful of stories about the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ get repeated: the angel Jibreel's repeated advice about neighbours, the grandchildren climbing on him during prayer, the man forgiven for giving water to a thirsty dog. I want to spend less time retelling those stories this time and more time on what they ask of us, because that's usually the part we skim past on our way to feeling moved by them.

Mercy that doesn't depend on being treated well

The Prophet ﷺ said that Jibreel kept advising him about treating neighbours well so persistently that he began to wonder whether a neighbour would eventually be given a share of inheritance. He held to that standard in practice too. He is reported to have gone to check on and sit with a young Jewish neighbour who fell ill, someone with no family or religious claim on his attention, simply because kindness toward the people around him wasn't supposed to depend on who they were or how they treated him back.

Most of us are decent to people roughly in proportion to how they treat us, which, if we're honest, isn't really compassion so much as bookkeeping. His standard didn't move depending on what he got back for it, and that's a genuinely difficult way to live. It's worth asking plainly whether our own patience and kindness toward people hold up when they've done nothing to deserve it, or whether we extend it to them once we’ve been given a reason to.

Taking children seriously

According to one narration, he came out to lead the evening prayer carrying his grandson, and when the child later climbed onto his back mid-prostration, he let the prostration run long rather than move him off. In another account, he was seen kissing his grandson Hasan in front of a companion who admitted he'd never kissed any of his own ten children, and he told the man plainly that whoever does not show mercy will not be shown mercy. He greeted children in the street and gave them the kind of attention that most adults reserve for people who might be useful to them somehow.

None of this is really about children specifically, since the underlying question is who we treat as worth our full attention in the first place. Children are usually the easiest people to speak over, hurry past, or fold into a wider conversation as a mild interruption, and the fact that he consistently didn't do that says something about the kind of presence he thought people deserved regardless of their standing.

Kindness with nothing to gain from it

According to a well-known narration in Sahih al-Bukhari, a man was forgiven simply for giving water to a thirsty dog using his own shoe, and the Prophet ﷺ told his companions afterwards that there is reward in kindness shown to any living creature. In another account, he came across a neglected, overworked camel that wept when it saw him, and rebuked the owner on its behalf, telling him to fear God regarding an animal that couldn't speak up for itself. Elsewhere, he's reported telling a companion who came upon a starving animal to fear God regarding these dumb creatures, feeding and riding them only when fit to bear it.

Animals can't repay kindness or thank you for it in front of others, which is exactly why these examples carry weight. They show what he did in situations where there was nothing in it for him and no one keeping score. Most of the kindness we show tends to happen where it will be noticed and remembered, and his didn't seem to need either.

What this asks of us

Put together, these aren't three separate lessons so much as the same standard applied in different directions: stay decent toward people even when they give you no reason to, pay attention to the people who are used to being overlooked, and be generous especially in the moments when nobody is watching, and nothing comes back to you as a result. That's a considerably higher bar than simply being a nice person, and most of us, myself very much included, fall short of it more often than we'd like to admit.

Turning it into something

Remembering the Prophet ﷺ shouldn't just sit in our heads for a month before fading back into the background once the month ends. If the real lesson underneath all of this is mercy toward those who have no way of repaying you, then at some point that must turn into something concrete rather than staying a nice thought.

There are widows right now raising entire families on their own, orphaned children whose futures depend on whether a stranger decides to step in, and families who walk for hours each day toward water that still isn't guaranteed to be clean once they reach it. None of them are able to pay any of it back, which was always the actual point of the examples above.

Muslim Aid works directly with these groups, helping widows hold their households together and giving orphaned children access to education and care they wouldn't otherwise have. Its water and sanitation projects build lasting water sources in the communities that need them most, the kind of support that keeps mattering long after the moment it was given.

Honouring this month with words is the easy part. Honouring it the way he lived means giving something to people who will never be able to thank you for it.