THE YEAR OF Sorrow. We know it as that devastating period when the Messenger ﷺ experienced the loss of his two main supports: his beloved wife Khadijah (ra) and his uncle Abu Talib.
We often focus on what the Prophet ﷺ lost in that year. But recently, I found myself reflecting on what Khadijah (ra) herself never witnessed.
She stood with the Messenger ﷺ through the hardest trials he faced in those early days. She witnessed him endure the anger and spite of the Quraysh. It must have been incredibly difficult for him, a man of supreme nobility and dignity, to be called the worst of names, to be branded a liar, a soothsayer, a madman. To face physical harm. To watch his followers being abused and tortured for no other reason than that they believed in La ilaha illallah.
The same trials were Khadijah’s (ra). She, too, was a person of immense nobility and standing. She was the accomplished businesswoman, the twice-widowed aristocrat who chose Muhammad ﷺ as her husband. Together, they were the golden couple of Makkah before prophethood. But that call changed everything for her. She gave up her comfort, her reputation, her ease. She died following the extreme hardship of the three-year boycott, weak and exhausted.
And here’s what strikes me: she never saw the day when Islam prevailed.
She didn’t get to see Madinah and the light that shone from it. She didn’t witness the day that Makkah was opened, and her people, those who had given her so much hardship, turned to Islam. She didn’t get to see her beloved ﷺ leading the people to Hajj. She wasn’t there when Islam spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula. She never saw the ummah that would number in the billions.
Everything she sacrificed for, everything she endured, she never saw its completion.
Yet there’s a profound lesson here, one that speaks to our own lives today.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to see the endpoint of your efforts or what you strive for. It doesn’t matter if you don’t witness success with your own eyes. What matters is that you do the right thing in the moment you are in. And that, Khadijah (ra) did without a shadow of a doubt.
She supported him ﷺ through every hardship, every single day. With comfort and kind words. With reassurance and her wealth. She brought peace to his heart when the world outside was chaos. No wonder Jibreel (as) conveyed Allah’s salam to her. No wonder that her house in Jannah will be a hollowed-out pearl in which there is no noise, a fitting reward for the silence and tranquillity she brought to the Messenger’s heart ﷺ after the noise of the day.
How often do we hold back from good work because we can’t see the results? How often do we become discouraged in our efforts, whether in dawah, in community building, in our own self-improvement, because the fruits of our labour seem distant or invisible?
We plant seeds in our communities that may only grow after we’re gone. We make sacrifices for causes that may only succeed in the next generation. We do good that we may never see acknowledged or completed in our lifetimes.
But that’s not our concern. Success, outcomes, results, these are with Allah.
Our job is to live in the now and do what we have to do now. To show up with sincerity in this moment, just as Khadijah (ra) did in hers.
That is enough.
Living For Islam 