God's Will

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A British friend, Fred, was visiting Sue and me in Beirut. He was thinking of buying a rug during his visit and so we gave him directions to a local store that sold carpets and rugs.

When the entered the store, he was surprised to see the owner was lying on the floor next to a pile of rolled up rugs. The owner explained that he was trying to reach a kitten that was hiding among the rugs. He’d been trying to coax it out for hours, he said, but with no success.

“Let me try,” said Fred. He got down on his hands and knees, made a couple of “pss” noises and out came a lovely little gray and white kitten.

The store owner grabbed the kitten, put it into a shoebox and tied up the box with string.

“Are you going to take it home?” asked Fred.

“Oh, no,” said the owner. “I don’t like cats.”

“You aren’t going to kill it, I hope, “ said Fred.

The owner looked shocked. “Oh, no, that would be haram (a sin).”

“So what are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to put the box in the middle of the road”.

Fred didn’t like the sound of this. “But it will get run over. You will have killed the kitten.”

“Not at all,” the owner responded. “If it gets run over, it'll be nothing to do with me. It will be Allah's will. We are all in Allah's hands.”

Like most Brits, Fred had a less fatalistic view of life. So that evening Sue and I came home to find we had become the adoptive parents of a little white and gray kitten. We named her Habibi.

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