The quiet corruption of comfort (part V)

By Yusuf Bulafu

Assalam alaykum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh

Cont’d ….

Governors with the souls of servants

In most of history, the road to power has always demanded a change in posture. A man becomes a governor and suddenly forgets the weight of his earlier hunger. A woman is given authority and soon forgets her prayers of desperation. But among the Prophet’s companions, many did rise to positions of immense power and yet the dust of humility from the Prophet’s masjid never left their feet. They sat on thrones, but they were still servants. They ruled provinces, but their hearts were ruled by Allah.

What is remarkable is not that they attained such power, it is that power did not bend them. It did not inflate their sense of self. It did not dilute their sincerity. The clothes they wore might have changed, but their inner posture remained the same: bowed before their Lord.

Consider Abu Huraira (may Allah be pleased with him). A man who once fainted from hunger in the Prophet’s mosque, mistaken by passersby for a madman, later became a governor. Yet when he walked through the market, he carried wood on his back and said with a playful smile, “Make way for the Amir!”

Power did not change his heart. It simply expanded his responsibility. And he met it with the same simplicity that had defined his days of need.

This was not unique to Abu Huraira. It was a pattern among the Sahabah. Zayd ibn Thabit, Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqas, Mu‘adh ibn Jabal; these men did not withdraw from the world, but they walked through it with reverence rather than arrogance. They governed not with superiority, but with a sense of sacred duty. Power was not for self-promotion; it was for service and the reminder of their beginnings was always near.

One companion, standing before his people as governor, gave a khutbah and said: “I remember the days when we were with the Prophet, and we had nothing to eat but leaves. We developed sores on our mouths. And now look at us; we are governors of lands. I fear that I may see myself as great, while I am small in the eyes of Allah.” He stood on a platform of status, but he trembled before the memory of his former poverty and the possibility of being deluded by his new privilege. That’s the soul of a servant even while wearing the robes of a governor.

What made them so different? They didn’t see governance as a prize, but as a burden. They didn’t think of authority as elevation, but as accountability. To them, leadership was a station that brought them closer to Allah only if they approached it with fear, sincerity, and service.

In our world today, people chase power with ambition, decorate it with ego, and weaponize it with pride. But in the prophetic community, power was only ever meaningful if it increased the servant’s sense of responsibility before God. To be a leader in the prophetic model is not to be obeyed, it is to be tested. It is not to be followed blindly, but to be watched closely. It is not to be honored unless that honor makes you humbler. The Sahabah did not lose themselves in authority. They measured every decision by the scale of the akhirah. Every title was seen through the lens of the day of judgement, where nothing would matter except the intentions behind the leadership.

To be continued …