Abdullah ibn 'Abbaas (RA) and wanting good for people who'd never know

The story

Ibn 'Abbaas once admitted something that sounds almost unbelievable: hearing that rain had fallen on land far away, he felt genuine happiness about it — despite not owning a single animal that grazed there, nothing to gain from the news at all. He said the same thing happened whenever he heard of a ruler governing with fairness, or whenever he recited a verse of the Qur'an and found himself wishing every person alive understood it as he did. None of it touched his own circumstances. He simply wanted good for people who would never know he'd wanted it.

That same generosity showed up in how he treated learning, only in reverse — instead of giving it away freely, he pursued it relentlessly. Orphaned of the Prophet's ﷺ direct teaching while still a young teenager, he refused to accept that his window for learning had closed. His method was simple and stubborn: track down anyone who knew something he didn't, and never trust a single account on its own. "If I wanted to understand something," he once said, "I'd ask thirty different companions about it." A friend mocked him once for bothering the older companions, certain they had nothing left to teach a boy his age. He kept going anyway.

That persistence sometimes meant showing up uninvited and waiting. If he learned a companion held a hadith worth hearing, he'd walk to the man's home, fold his cloak under his head, and lie down by the door until the man's afternoon rest ended on its own. Dust would settle over him in the wind while he waited. When the door finally opened and the man, mortified, asked why he hadn't simply sent word ahead, Ibn 'Abbaas gave the same reply every time: it was the other man who deserved to be visited, not summoned.

Within a few years that same young man was being consulted by 'Umar himself on matters of state, addressed — half in jest, wholly in respect — as "the young leader of the elders." Yet nothing about his standing changed how he prayed. Those near him said his face was rarely dry during salah, tears falling not for show but simply because the words moved him. He spent decades this way — still curious, still generous, still glad for whatever good reached other people. When he was seventy-one and his time finally came, a verse was recited over him that seemed to have been waiting for exactly that moment: "O soul at peace, return to your Lord, well pleased and well pleasing."