17
(Essay)
Say Less
The tongue, silence, and why speech is the first thing a free man rations.
By Mike Rashid King • Allah's Humble Servant
The loud man
The man who talks the most at the weigh-in is the one I stopped worrying about.
I learned that in the gym before I learned anything about the deen (the complete way of life Islam prescribes). You stand across from a man at the press table. He has a lot to say. He has predictions. He has a name for you. The cameras love him. And something in your chest goes quiet, because you have been in enough gyms to know what the noise is covering. A man who already knows what he is going to do to you on Saturday does not need Wednesday.
The same thing was true on the block. The loudest one on the corner was never the one you had to watch. The one you had to watch said almost nothing. He let the loud one talk for him.
The same thing is true at the deal table. I have sat across from men with money who could not stop telling me about it. I have sat across from men with more money who let me talk, and by the time I finished I had told them everything they needed and they had told me nothing. One of us got the better terms.
Speech is a resource. I spent it like it was free for years. It is the first thing a free man learns to ration, because every sentence that leaves his mouth is one of three things: a weapon he just handed away, a promise he now has to keep, or a word he will answer for.
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The watcher at your mouth
Allah put a recorder on every word.
مَّا يَلْفِظُ مِن قَوْلٍ إِلَّا لَدَيْهِ رَقِيبٌ عَتِيدٌۭ
Ma yalfizu min qawlin illa ladayhi raqibun atid
Man does not utter any word except that with him is an observer prepared to record. (Surah Qaf 50:18)
Read the two ayat (verses) before it. He is closer to you than your jugular vein. Two receivers sit on your right and your left. Then the line about the word. The order is deliberate. Allah knows what your nafs (the self, the lower soul) whispers before it becomes speech. Then the angels take down what you let out of your mouth. The whisper is yours to fight. The word is on the record.
I have written about the two who write. What I want you to feel here is simpler. There is no sentence you have ever said that was free. Every one of them was filed.
The command on speech is exact:
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ ٱتَّقُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ وَقُولُوا۟ قَوْلًۭا سَدِيدًۭا
Ya ayyuha alladhina amanu ittaqu Allaha wa qulu qawlan sadida
O you who have believed, fear Allah and speak words of appropriate justice. (Surah Al-Ahzab 33:70)
Qawlan sadidan. Straight speech. A word that hits what it aims at and nothing else. The next ayah tells you what it buys: Allah sets your deeds right and forgives your sins. A man's whole record gets repaired on the back of how he talks. That is how much weight the tongue carries.
When Allah describes the believers in Surah Al-Mu'minun, the second mark He gives them is on the tongue. They turn away from laghw. Laghw is idle talk, the noise that fills a room and leaves nothing behind. It sits in the list right after humility in prayer and right before zakat (the obligatory charity). The tongue is named before the wallet.
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What the Prophet ﷺ said about the tongue
He gave the rule in one line. Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, let him speak good or stay silent. Two doors. Good, or quiet. There is no third door for the man who is bored, the man who wants to be seen, or the man who needs to fill the air.
Sahih al-Bukhari 6018, narrated by Abu Hurairah
He put a price on it. He told Sahl ibn Sa'd that whoever guarantees him what is between his jaws and what is between his legs, he guarantees him Paradise. The tongue and the private parts, in one sentence, for one reward. I read that pairing as one discipline governing two appetites. That reading is mine. The pairing is his.
He showed Mu'adh ibn Jabal with his own hand. After teaching him the pillars of the deen and the gates of good, he took hold of his tongue and told him to restrain it. Mu'adh asked whether they would be taken to account for what they say. The Prophet ﷺ answered with a question. What throws people into the Fire on their faces except what their tongues have wrought? The hadith is graded hasan. Hasan means sound, a chain the scholars accept, one grade below sahih (authentic).
When you want to know how he ﷺ used his own tongue, listen to his wife. Aisha said he spoke so clearly and so deliberately that anyone who wanted to could have counted his words. The man carrying the final revelation spoke in countable words. He had more to say than any man who ever lived, and he said it in sentences you could number.
That is the standard. Countable words.
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Why the loud man is the weak man
Noise is leakage. The deen taught me the rule. The ring had already shown me the mechanism.
Three leaks.
The first leak is the witness. The man who announces what he is going to do is looking for a room to confirm him. He needs you to hear it so it feels real to him. A man who is certain has no use for the room. He has use for Saturday.
The second leak is the explanation. Watch a man explain himself when nobody asked. He is negotiating. Every sentence is a request for permission, and the person he is asking is the person he just told he does not need. I have done it. I know what it feels like from the inside. It feels like strength while you are doing it and it reads like a man asking to be let off.
The third leak is the eyes. A man who is talking is not watching. In the ring that gets you hit. In business that gets you robbed politely, with a signature. On the block it gets you worse. The one on the corner who said nothing was collecting.
Dialectical Thinking demands the objection. The Prophet ﷺ preached. He taught for twenty three years. His companions spoke, argued, recited, and sang. The deen has a tongue. So the command cannot be silence.
Correct. The command is weight. He ﷺ spoke when the word had a job, and he spoke it once, clearly, in words you could count. The ration is by weight. The best corner I ever had said one thing between rounds. One. It was the thing. I kept that man. The corner that talked through the whole minute was performing, and the only person he was performing for was himself.
A man who has mastered his tongue can give a khutbah (the Friday sermon) and it lands like a hammer, because every word in it was paid for. A man who has not mastered it can say the same words and the room checks its phone.
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The practice
The rule is the Prophet's: good, or silence. The drills are mine.
- Before you speak, ask one question. Does this word have a job? Good is a job. Truth that someone needs is a job. Peace is a job. If the sentence has no job, swallow it. That is Bukhari 6018 turned into a reflex.
- Say it once. A man who repeats himself is asking the room whether it heard him. Say it once, at the volume the room needs and no higher. Luqman told his son to lower his voice and named the braying of the donkey as the ugliest sound there is (Surah Luqman 31:19). The donkey is loud because it has nothing else.
- Do the thing before you say the thing. The announcement is a debt. The result is a payment. Pay first. I have built things people heard about after they were built, and I have talked about things that never got built. I know which list I would rather be on.
- When the ignorant come at you, give them peace and keep walking. That is Allah's own description of the servants of the Most Merciful (Surah Al-Furqan 25:63). It is a man refusing to spend his tongue on someone who cannot afford it.
- Put the tongue to work on dhikr (the remembrance of Allah). A tongue busy with SubhanAllah (glory be to Allah) has no room for the rest. Keep tasbih (prayer beads for counting remembrance) on you. In the car. In the line. On the walk from the parking lot. Every one of those is a place your mouth used to leak.
- Pick one day a week. Answer when asked. Volunteer nothing. You will learn how much of your speech was leakage by how much of the day stays empty, and you will learn how much of it was good by who comes looking for your voice.
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The quiet work
I named this place The Quiet Work for a reason. The work that changes a man happens where nobody is listening. The prayer at night. The dua (supplication) in the car with the engine off. The round on the heavy bag with no camera in the room. None of it needs an announcement, and all of it gets recorded anyway, by the two who write.
Say less. Then say less than that. Let the work talk, and let the angels do the writing.
Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day, let him speak good or stay silent.
By Mike Rashid King • Allah's Humble Servant