The hadith of the hypocrite

I have been using Google's marvelous Desktop for about a month and, as I commented recently in my memex blog, it's magic.

Here's a diary entry from 10/31/04:

1:29 PM: I loaded NITLE's al-musharaka blog, found a comment from one of last summer's NITLE seminar members, and started to write her an email. I tried one of my Hadith links, thought of the 1982 Zawiya field trip, and H's teaching me the  “three qualities of the hypocrite” Hadith, couldn’t find it in Bukhari, then with Google Desktop quickly got to my October 2, 1995, letter to H about our Fulbright setup in Rabat, where I found myself quoting it.

Volume 1, Book 2, Number 32:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, "The signs of a hypocrite are three:
1. Whenever he speaks, he tells a lie.
2. Whenever he promises, he always breaks it (his promise ).
3. If you trust him, he proves to be dishonest. (If you keep something as a trust with him, he will not return it.)

and of course Google Desktop should know where to find my transliteration of Hamid’s initial teaching of this Hadith.

Well, here’s a letter to N the same day as the one to H.

1:51 PM: And, suddenly, I am in the moment, 22 years ago.

19-Jul-82 10:10a. {the morning after laylat al-qadr} We seem to have passed last night's releasing of the jnun without being struck (or is there an incubation period?). It was a full night: H and I went out and bought some buxhor (a mixture of perhaps 10 aromatic spices, gums, and incence wood), in the late afternoon. This I sprinkled on glowing charcoal in a small mizmar A brought around after ftur. The smoke, and that of Indian type incence sticks purchased from the same man in the main street, discourages jnun being released from their Ramadan bondage on lailat lqadr from settling in one's house. Special attention is paid to all places water is stored or poured, and to bedrooms [it didn't seem to me people were as concerned as I about doing this just before and during the point of realease of the jnun, which I understood to be either midnight or fajr {cf. Sura 97}]. H and I walked around a lot, noticing the heavy activity around the siyyid, where the tolba pray all night. Seeing young men he knew heading up to the mosque made him regret not having continued to pray and led to a long discussion of his feeling hypocritical when he found himself in late secondary school thinking about all sorts of other things instead of being able to focus all his attention on prayer [this sounded very familiar to me, and to S when I repeated it]. He offered a Hadith in definition of hypocrisy, which we worked at translating later before dinner:

ayatu al-munafiq talata ida Hadata kadaba wa ida itummina xana wa ida wa'ada axlafa The characteristics of the hypocrite are three: his speech is lies, his trust false, and his promise broken.

We talked standing by the taxi-stop bridge about H's feeling re the difficulties of being true to the tenets of Islam and the general issues of piety and hypocrisy. I suggested that no one fulfulls every tenet of religion, and told the "let him who is without sin among you" anecdote. He then offered the fqi who was our next door neighbor as an example of a "perfect" man: he fasted three months of the year, never missed a prayer, and was always working his rosary. I asked [this sounded a little Pharasitical to me] whether he was also kind to his family, and H said sure without elaborating.

11/29/04: Here's the Arabic text of the Hadith (note the transposition of the second and third clauses in the 1982 version):

‏عن النبي ‏ ‏صلى الله عليه وسلم ‏ ‏قال ‏ ‏آية ‏ ‏المنافق ثلاث إذا حدث كذب وإذا وعد ‏ ‏أخلف ‏ ‏وإذا اؤتمن خان