Mirrors to one another

Today's khutbah delivered by my teacher and brother, Sh Sohaib Saeed was about the hadith of the Prophet SAW below:

Abu Huraira reported: The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “The believer is a mirror to his faithful brother. He protects him against loss and defends him behind his back.”
Source: Al-Adab Al-Mufrad 239
Grade: Hasan (fair) according to Al-Bukhari

Below are some points and wisdoms from the hadith :

1)      A mirror reflects your image as you are without distortion. What is small is small, and what is big is big. Similarly, we should not blow out of proportion the faults we see in others. If there is a small blemish on our face, while the rest of the face is handsome, then we should look at that face as such, a handsome face with a tiny blemish. We advice our brothers appropriately for their faults, but also praise them appropriately too.

2)      A mirror reflects our own image. And so if we see a fault in someone, we should reflect whether we have such a fault or not, before jumping to correct others. It doesn’t mean that we should only advice people if we are perfect which is impossible, but it means that we should learn from the mistakes of others and advice others in a way that we would like to receive it if we had the same fault. On a broader level, if a society is constantly faced with problems from a group of people, then perhaps something is wrong with the society as a whole. The society needs to look at itself and reflect on why such problems occur and what it can do as a whole to help solve the problem.

3)      A mirror only reflects the image of a person when he/she is in front of it. Once the person turns away, the image disappears i.e. the mirror does not retain the image and show it to others. In the same way, we should not speak about the faults of our brothers in their absence. Unfortunately, many of us today behave more like video recorders rather than mirrors. We store all the information about an image, and then replay it back to others!

4)      A mirror is only useful if it is clean. So in order for us to be of benefit to others, we need to be clean ourselves. Not only is a dirty mirror useless, it gives a false impression of blemishes and defects when there are none. 

5)      Finally, when we put two mirrors in front of each other, the images that form go on to infinity. And so when believers truly function as mirrors to one another, the benefits they gain are inifinite.

So let us be mirrors to one another as per the advice of the Prophet SAW, that we may be a brotherhood with infinite potential, achieving great things insya Allah.