Riyad as-Salihin, hadithi 1

Imam an-Nawawi (631–676 AH) opens Riyad as-Salihin — The Gardens of the Righteous — with this same hadith of intention, and in this context the placement takes on its most explicitly spiritual and transformative significance. The Riyad as-Salihin is not a legal reference like the Sunan of Abu Dawud or the Muwatta; it is a collection of hadiths intended for the spiritual cultivation and moral refinement of the ordinary Muslim.

It is among the most widely read Islamic books in history, translated into dozens of languages and used in homes, mosques, and classrooms across the Muslim world for over seven centuries. Imam an-Nawawi's decision to open this beloved collection with the hadith of intentions signals his vision for what the book is meant to do: before cultivating any virtue, before performing any act of piety recorded in the pages that follow, the Muslim must first attend to the inner life.

The outer acts of the righteous — the night prayers, the acts of charity, the patience under hardship, the treatment of family, the remembrance of Allah — all described in the hadiths that follow, are alive and fruitful only when rooted in sincere intention.

In this reading, the hadith of intentions serves as a seed principle for the entire garden metaphor of the book's title. A garden grows when its roots are sound. The root of all righteous deeds (salihat) is a sound and sincere heart. 'Innamal a'malu binniyyat' — actions exist and have worth only through intentions — is therefore not merely a legal principle about the validity of acts but a gardener's first instruction: before planting anything, prepare the soil.

The soil of righteous deeds is the purified heart directed toward Allah. Every hadith in Riyad as-Salihin about patience, about generosity, about prayer, about truthfulness, must be read through the lens established on the very first page: what is your intention? Are you patient because you love Allah and trust His decree, or because you fear social judgment? Are you generous because you desire only His pleasure, or because you enjoy the admiration of those around you?

Imam an-Nawawi wrote Riyad as-Salihin in Damascus during the thirteenth century CE — a period of profound upheaval for the Muslim world. The Mongol invasions had devastated the Abbasid caliphate, culminating in the sack of Baghdad in 1258 CE (just thirteen years before an-Nawawi wrote this collection), which destroyed the greatest centre of Islamic civilisation and killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims. The Crusades were still active in the Levant, and the Muslim world was in a state of military, political, and moral crisis.

An-Nawawi, who lived as an ascetic scholar in Damascus and died at only forty-five years old having never married and having spent his life entirely in scholarship and worship, wrote Riyad as-Salihin as a spiritual corrective: a reminder that the source of the Muslim community's strength was never its political power or its armies but its moral and spiritual integrity.

By opening this collection — written in a moment of civilisational crisis — with the hadith of intentions, an-Nawawi was making a profound statement: the renewal of the Muslim community must begin not with politics or military strategy but with the renewal of sincerity in the hearts of individual Muslims. If the garden of righteousness (riyad al-salihin) is to bloom again in Muslim civilisation, it must be planted in hearts that have first been oriented sincerely toward Allah. Every subsequent hadith in the collection — about justice, about forbearance, about the treatment of the poor, about the obligations of knowledge — flows from this fountainhead of intention.

Imam an-Nawawi himself, in the brief introduction to Riyad as-Salihin, explains his purpose: he has compiled hadiths relating to the cultivation of the inner life, the purification of deeds, and the practice of the path of the righteous (al-salihin), drawing from the Quran and the authentic Sunnah. His commentary on the opening hadith draws directly from his earlier and more extensive commentary in Sharh Sahih Muslim, where he explains that the hadith establishes both the fiqhi rule (no act of worship is valid without intention) and the spiritual principle (the worth of any act in Allah's sight is proportional to the quality of its intention).

An-Nawawi emphasises in Sharh Sahih Muslim that ikhlas (sincerity) and niyyah (intention) are not identical — ikhlas refers to the purification of intention from all motives except Allah's pleasure, while niyyah simply refers to the directedness of an act — and that the full spiritual potential of the hadith is realised only when one achieves not merely niyyah but ikhlas.

The great Andalusian scholar Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, in his work al-Tashil li 'Ulum al-Tanzil, connects this hadith's principle to the Quranic emphasis on ikhlas throughout the Quran, particularly in Surah al-Bayyinah (98:5): 'And they were not commanded except to worship Allah, being sincere to Him in religion.' Ibn Juzayy argues that this verse and the hadith of intentions form a single unified teaching: the entire structure of Islamic obligation, Quranic and prophetic, converges on the demand for a sincere heart as the indispensable foundation of all accepted worship.

In the context of Riyad as-Salihin, this means every one of the over one thousand hadiths an-Nawawi collected about the righteous is, at a deeper level, a hadith about how to purify and orient the heart.

Riyad as-Salihin is a book designed to be read daily — even a single hadith per day, reflected upon and applied, is the traditional methodology of using this collection. Begin by committing to read one hadith from Riyad as-Salihin each morning, applying the lesson of this opening hadith as a lens through which to read everything that follows: before reading each hadith, ask yourself, what is my intention for reading this?

Is it to increase my knowledge so that I can show it to others, or is it to increase my love of Allah and my ability to serve His creation? Holding this question before each session of reading transforms the act of learning from information consumption into an act of worship. Many Muslims who adopt this daily practice find that over the course of a year they have moved through a significant portion of the collection and have experienced a gradual but tangible deepening of their spiritual life.

For families, Riyad as-Salihin read together after one of the daily prayers — particularly after Fajr or after Isha — is one of the most recommended practices for building an Islamic household culture. The opening hadith gives the family a shared framework: before reading tonight's hadith, let us each briefly share one action we took today and honestly ask ourselves what our intention was. This practice of collective intention-examination, even done briefly, builds in children and adults alike the habit of self-examination that this hadith demands.

Over months and years, a family that regularly asks 'why are we doing what we are doing?' becomes a family grounded in sincerity, resistant to hypocrisy, and capable of sustaining religious practice through the inevitable difficulties of life because it is rooted in the most durable foundation possible: genuine love of and desire to please Allah.

Seen through the spiritual lens of Riyad as-Salihin, this hadith reveals the Prophet ﷺ as a physician of souls who understood that the most dangerous spiritual diseases — hypocrisy (nifaq), showing off (riya), and self-deception (ghurur) — all arise from a corrupted or misdirected intention. Before prescribing any remedy, any act of worship, any deed of righteousness, he addressed the pathology at its source: the heart's orientation. The fact that this statement opens not just one but multiple major collections of his teachings suggests that the scholars who preserved his legacy understood this about him too: his primary concern was never with the outer form of religious life but with its inner integrity.

He was a Prophet sent to perfect moral character (akhlaq), and the foundation of all moral character is the alignment of inner intention with outward action.

Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA) stands as the lone companion narrator of this hadith in its earliest chain, and this solitary narration has been the subject of scholarly attention across Islamic history. The fact that a hadith of such universal importance — used to open multiple hadith collections spanning two centuries of compilation — was preserved through a single companion in the first generation speaks to the companions' rigorous standard of only narrating what they had personally witnessed and verified.

Umar's singular narration is not a weakness but a testimony to his probity: he narrated exactly what he had heard, without embellishment or supplementation from other companions' recollections. His towering personal authority — as al-Faruq, as the Caliph who presided over the greatest expansion of Islam, as the man whom the Prophet ﷺ said the shaitan runs from — gives this solitary chain the spiritual weight of an entire library.

I came to the Prophet ﷺ once carrying this question in my heart without knowing how to ask it: why do some men seem to do the same things and yet be so utterly different? Why does one man's prayer seem to fill a room with light and another man's prayer seem to be merely an arrangement of movements? And then he said it, without my asking: 'Innamal a'malu binniyyat.' Actions are only by intentions.

And I understood in that moment that what I had been sensing was real. The difference between two men performing the same act is in a place no one can see except Allah — the intention. I have carried these words through every battle, every decision of governance, every moment of doubt about whether I am doing what is right or merely what is expected. They are the measure of my life. Let them be the measure of yours. (Creative narrative based on authentic hadith)

Motivational neuroscience provides compelling support for the core insight of this hadith as placed in the spiritual context of Riyad as-Salihin. Research by Dr. Richard Ryan and Dr. Edward Deci in Self-Determination Theory has consistently demonstrated that intrinsic motivation — doing something for its inherent value rather than external reward — produces not only greater performance but more sustained behaviour, greater psychological well-being, and deeper personal growth. When applied to religious practice, studies on religious motivation by psychologists including Dr. Kenneth Pargament at Bowling Green State University show that intrinsically motivated religious practice — worship done because of genuine love and relationship with the divine rather than social obligation or fear of judgment — is associated with significantly better psychological resilience, greater compassion toward others, more consistent ethical behaviour, and greater resistance to burnout and religious disillusionment.

The hadith's demand for sincere intention is thus not only theologically sound but psychologically optimal: the most sustainable and transformative form of worship is that which arises from genuine desire to connect with Allah rather than from external social pressure.

Scholars of Islamic spirituality (tasawwuf) and jurists (fuqaha) have debated the relationship between niyyah and ikhlas as dimensions of this hadith. The Sufi tradition, represented by scholars like al-Harith al-Muhasibi in his Kitab al-Ri'ayah and Imam al-Ghazali in Ihya 'Ulum al-Din, argues that the hadith points not merely to the juristic requirement of intention but to the spiritual demand for complete sincerity — and that achieving this level of sincerity requires extensive inner work: muhasabah (self-examination), mujahada (spiritual struggle against the ego), and tazkiyat al-nafs (purification of the soul).

The juristic tradition, as represented by the four madhabs, focuses on the legal dimension — intent is required for the validity of worship — without always engaging the deeper spiritual psychology that the Sufi commentators emphasise. Imam an-Nawawi himself, who was a Shafi'i jurist deeply sympathetic to the spiritual tradition, positioned Riyad as-Salihin precisely as a bridge between these two dimensions, seeking to bring the spiritual depth of the intention hadith into the daily practice of ordinary Muslims without requiring them to be advanced spiritual practitioners.

You have been reading Riyad as-Salihin for several months and have genuinely benefited spiritually. One day, your sheikh mentions in a lecture that a mark of a sincere student of knowledge is that they apply what they learn before teaching it to others. You realise that you have recently begun sharing hadiths and religious knowledge on social media before truly implementing the lessons yourself, and that part of your motivation has shifted from personal transformation to building a religious online presence.

Reflecting on this opening hadith of Riyad as-Salihin — and its demand that every action be examined for its true intention — what immediate and specific changes would you make to both your learning practice and your use of social media to realign your pursuit of knowledge with genuine sincerity?