the Unreachable

This is an advice for brothers, but sisters can bear it in mind too. Not everybody can be reached. Not everybody can change. Not everybody can be guided. Not everybody can be won over.

There's a difference between being idealistic and optimistic and being naive. You can't change everyone, and you shouldn't try. As much as we would like to think otherwise, the fact of the matter is that there are just some bad people. Think of the boy that Al Khidr killed. He was bad, and he was always gonna be bad.

Some souls were destined for the hellfire before they were ever blown into a body. It is what it is. Of course, we don't have knowledge about who is or who is not destined for a jahannam. We can't make those kinds of judgments, not even about ourselves. But what we can do is manage our expectations based on the signals that people demonstrate.

Some people can change because they possess the necessary elements in their character or personality to change. And we can see that in examples from the Sahaba, like the story of Abdullah bin Ruwaha and Abu Darda. They had a bond of brotherhood since the time of Jahiliyah, they and knew each other very, very well. But when Abdullah embraced Islam, Abu Darda did not. Finally, one day, Abdullah went to Abu Darda's house when he wasn't home, and he destroyed his idol.

Of course, when Abu Urdad came home, he was furious to find his idol broken in pieces, but he was a thinking and reflective man. And so he thought about it and realized, well, if this idol had any power at all, it would have defended itself. And that was the catalyst for him embracing Islam. But then there are some people who can only change really by divine intervention, like say, this is not someone who anyone would have expected to embrace Islam. He was literally calling himself a prophet during the lifetime of Rasulullah He fought against the Muslims.

He fought against Abu Bakr, but ultimately embraced Islam and died as a Shahid in the cause of Allah. No one could have seen that coming. That was an example of Allah's conspicuous intervention. Now I'm not telling you to write anyone off as a lost cause, but just to manage your expectations and make an informed decision about how much of your time and energy is worth investing in that person, and when maybe it makes more sense to just keep your distance. If a person does not appear to possess the requisite internal resources for change, it's like trying to make a dish without the ingredients.

And if a person possesses elements in their personality or in their thinking that actually hinders the possibility of change, like say, an inflated ego, obsession with the dunya, or deep ideological indoctrination, it may be the most you can do to just pray to Allah for them to be guided and then cease engaging with them. Because in these conditions, your engagement with them may actually harden their hearts more rather than do the reverse. Wisdom doesn't always mean knowing what to say. Sometimes it means knowing when not to say anything at all.