Whose Garden Is This?

The Prophet ﷺ told us the story of a man who lived among the nations that came before us.

One day, this man was walking through a vast, uninhabited land when he suddenly heard something astonishing.

A voice came from a cloud.

It said:

— Water the garden of so-and-so.

A name had just been spoken.

Then the cloud moved away in a direction.

The man then saw the cloud pour its water onto a harrah, a land covered with black stones.

The rain had just fallen, but the man was about to witness something special.

All the water gathered in one of the natural channels of that land, then it began to flow.

Intrigued, the man decided to follow the water.

He continued until its course led him to a garden.

In that garden there was a man.

He stood in the middle of his land and directed the water with a kind of hoe, to make it flow through his garden.

The man who had followed the water then addressed the owner:

— Servant of Allah, what is your name?

The owner answered him.

It was exactly the name that the voice had spoken in the cloud.

The owner of the garden then asked him:

— Servant of Allah, why do you ask me my name?

The man told him what had just happened:

— I heard a voice in the cloud from which this water comes say: “Water the garden of so-and-so,” pronouncing your name.

Then he asked him a question:

— What do you do with this garden?

He wanted to know what this man did with everything his garden produced.

The Owner's Secret

The owner replied:

— Since you tell me this, here is what I do.

When his garden produced its fruits and harvests, he looked at everything Allah had given him, then he divided this produce into three parts.