Faith is seventy odd branches, and almost nobody has seen the list. Two classical compilers wrote all of it down, chapter by chapter.
Number sixty-five on the list is answering a man who sneezes. Number sixty-two is returning a greeting. Number sixty-eight is feeding a guest properly. These are not somebody's notes on good manners. They are numbered chapters in a book that sets out what faith is made of, and they sit in the same sequence as belief in the angels and the fear of Allah.
The branches of faith are the beliefs and the acts that the Quran and the Prophet ﷺ count as parts of iman rather than as extras bolted onto it. He ﷺ said that faith is sixty odd branches, and that modesty is a branch of faith (Sahih al-Bukhari 9). A fuller wording in Sahih Muslim gives the top and the bottom of the range: the best of them is saying la ilaha illa Allah, and the lowest of them is removing a harm from the road. He ﷺ never went through the rest. Two scholars did. Al-Halimi laid the branches out as seventy-seven chapters in a book called al-Minhaj, and al-Bayhaqi then took the same seventy-seven, kept the order, and built seven volumes on it under the title Shuab al-Iman, the branches of faith.
This is not the five pillars wearing a different hat. On that list, the prayer is chapter twenty-one. The zakah is twenty-two. The fast is twenty-three. The rites of hajj are twenty-five. Four chapters out of seventy-seven. The hadith wording moves between sixty odd and seventy odd, which is why the compilers land on slightly different totals, and Ibn Hajar preserves al-Qadi Iyad's remark that not knowing the exact tally does no damage to anyone's faith.
Al-Bayhaqi says in his own preface where the arrangement came from. He found that al-Halimi had already brought out the branches referred to in the hadith of the Messenger ﷺ, explaining the reality of each one and what it requires. So, he writes, I followed him in dividing the hadith across the chapters, and I quoted his words on them so the point of each chapter would be clear. Then one correction. Al-Halimi had kept only the texts and dropped the chains of transmission to save space, and al-Bayhaqi, holding to the habit of the people of hadith, put every chain back in.
Al-Halimi's own book has a stranger shape than people expect. The branches are the tenth and last section of ten, arriving after nine sections on what faith actually is, whether it rises and falls, and who counts as a believer. Only then does he write that this chapter divides into seventy-seven chapters, and start listing them.
He also explains why seventy-seven and not more. Somebody before him had produced a set of seventy-nine, and al-Halimi went through it and found that the man had taken one thing whose wording differed between the narrations, split it across two chapters, and counted it as two branches. He had done the same with two things that share one root and cannot be told apart. And he had left other things out completely.
Ibn Hajar compressed the whole structure into a page of Fath al-Bari. The branches, he writes, come out of three things: the actions of the heart, the actions of the tongue, and the actions of the body.
Faith has an interior before it has anything else. The bedouins say, we have believed. Say, you have not yet believed, but say instead, we have submitted, for faith has not yet entered your hearts (49:14). The heart carries twenty-four branches, the beliefs and the intentions. Faith in Allah, in His angels, His books, His messengers, in the decree with its good and its bad, in the Last Day with everything folded inside it from the questioning in the grave to the scale and the bridge. Then love of Allah, love of the Prophet ﷺ, sincerity, repentance, fear, hope, gratitude, patience, contentment with what is decreed, reliance, mercy, humility, and the leaving of pride, envy, spite and rage.
The tongue carries seven. Saying the testimony of oneness out loud, reciting the Quran, learning knowledge, teaching it, supplication, remembrance including seeking forgiveness, and keeping off idle talk.
The body carries thirty-eight, and Ibn Hajar splits those three ways. Fifteen belong to a person on his own: purification, covering what must be covered, the prayer, the zakah, freeing a slave, generosity including feeding people and honouring a guest, the fast, hajj, umra, circling the House, retreat in the mosque, seeking the Night of Decree, getting out with your religion intact, keeping a vow, care with oaths, paying the expiations. Six belong to the household: marrying to stay chaste, the rights of dependents, honouring parents, raising children, keeping ties of kin, and dealing gently with those under your authority.
The remaining seventeen belong to everybody else, and this is the group that changes the question. Ruling with justice. Keeping with the community. Obeying those in authority. Reconciling people who have fallen out. Cooperating in what is good, which takes in commanding right and forbidding wrong. Jihad, and guarding the frontier. Giving back what you were trusted with. A loan, and paying it off. Treating your neighbour well. Dealing honestly, which includes earning your money from somewhere lawful. Spending it where it belongs, which includes not being wasteful. Returning a greeting. Answering a man who sneezes. Keeping your own harm away from people. Staying off the amusements that pull you under. And lifting something harmful off the road.
Run back through that and notice what it is. Not character traits a religion recommends on the side. Branches of the thing itself. Ibn Hajar counts sixty-nine traits in the three groups, and notes that they come to seventy-nine if you separate out the ones he joined together.
Visiting a sick person is chapter sixty-three. Covering up the fault of somebody who slipped is sixty-nine. Mercy towards the young and respect towards the old share chapter seventy-five, and al-Halimi says he put the two in one chapter deliberately, because they are the same instruction seen from both ends, treating each person according to his measure and what suits his station.
Ibn Hajar adds one observation that reframes the exercise. Bukhari set two Quran passages at the head of the chapter where this hadith sits, and Ibn Hajar reads that as a hint that the branches can be counted straight out of verses like these.
The first is the long verse on righteousness. Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward the east or the west, but righteousness is in one who believes in Allah, the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets, and gives wealth, in spite of love for it, to relatives, orphans, the needy, the traveler, those who ask for help, and for freeing slaves, and who establishes prayer and gives zakah, and those who fulfill their promise when they promise, and those who are patient in poverty and hardship and during battle (2:177).
The second is the opening of Surah al-Muminun. Certainly will the believers have succeeded, they who are during their prayer humbly intent, and they who turn away from ill speech, and they who are observant of zakah (23:1 to 23:4), running on through guarding chastity and keeping trusts.
Ibn Hibban worked that way, according to Ibn Hajar. He counted every act of obedience that Allah counts in His Book as faith, and every act the Messenger ﷺ counts as faith, deleted the repetitions, and arrived at seventy-seven.
The hadith names removing a harm from the road as the lowest branch. The compilers do not put it last. Al-Halimi's seventy-seventh and final chapter is that a man love for his brother what he loves for himself, and dislike for him what he dislikes for himself, and he files removing harm from the road inside that chapter as a piece of it. Al-Bayhaqi closes his seven volumes on the same chapter.
So the list opens with belief in Allah and shuts with wanting for another man what you want for yourself. And the smallest entry on it, the one the Prophet ﷺ named as the floor, turns out to be a stone lifted off a path where somebody you will never meet is about to walk.
Silsila Research Desk
Grade: Sahih · 7 min read