Arba'un 31 — renounce the world and God will love you

الأربعون 31 — ازهد في الدنيا يحبك الله

The hadith of Sahl ibn Sa'd al-Sa'idi that a man came to the Prophet ﷺ asking to be shown a deed by which God and the people would love him, and was answered 'renounce the world and God will love you; renounce what is in people's hands and people will love you' — the thirty-first of al-Nawawi's Forty and of Ibn Rajab's commentary, transmitted by Ibn Majah (4102) through Khalid ibn Amr al-Qurashi from Sufyan al-Thawri from Abu Hazim from him; al-Nawawi calls it hasan with a hasan chain, but for Ibn Rajab there is a difficulty: Ahmad called Khalid ibn Amr al-Qurashi al-Umawi 'rejected in hadith', once 'not trustworthy, narrating false hadiths', once 'a liar who fabricated reports on Shu'ba'; Ibn Ma'in said 'his hadith is nothing'; al-Bukhari and Abu Zur'a 'rejected in hadith'; Abu Hatim 'abandoned and weak'; Salih ibn Muhammad and Ibn Adi accused him of fabrication; and Ibn Hibban contradicted himself, listing him among the trustworthy and among the weak with 'he used to single out fabrications away from the trustworthy; his report may not be used in proof'; al-Uqayli found it baseless from al-Thawri while Muhammad ibn Kathir al-San'ani — the Masisi, weakened by Ahmad yet trustworthy for many memorisers — followed him, perhaps having taken and concealed it, as did the contested Abu Qatada al-Harrani and Mihran ibn Abi Umar al-Razi; Ibn Adi confessed 'I do not know what to say of it'; Ibn Abi Hatim's father called it false on this chain; and when Ibn Mushaysh asked Ahmad about it he exclaimed 'who narrates this?' and, told it was Khalid ibn Amr, said 'we have fallen upon Khalid ibn Amr' and fell silent in disapproval — Abu Ubayd al-Qasim ibn Sallam having narrated it in his Mawa'iz and nearly rejected it until told Waki' had been asked about it; yet the hadith's meaning is sound and witnessed elsewhere: Sahl's report in al-Tirmidhi (2320) 'were the world worth a mosquito's wing to God He would not give an unbeliever a drink of it', graded sahih; the linguistic sense of zuhd as turning away from a thing in contempt and rising above it; and Abu Muslim al-Khawlani's definition, halted in Ahmad's Kitab al-Zuhd and preferred so by Ibn Rajab — that renouncing the world is not forbidding the lawful nor wasting wealth but being more confident in what is in God's hand than what is in your own, and more hopeful, when struck by calamity, for its reward and store than for its survival — while Abu Sulayman al-Darani gathers all its meanings as 'renouncing whatever occupies you away from God' (Jami' al-Ulum wal-Hikam pp. 639–666).