Adam, peace be upon him, had just been buried. Two of his sons had already torn the family in half, one of them raising his hand against his brother and spilling the first blood the earth had ever soaked up. So when the father of all of us closed his eyes for the last time, the real question was simple and heavy: who would keep the flame? Who would go on reminding people, in a world barely begun, that there is One God and He alone is to be worshipped?
This is day five, and it belongs to a son the Qur'an does not name but the Prophet ﷺ told us about: Shith, peace be upon him, known in English as Seth. A shorter story than most, because so little of it is firmly established, which is exactly why Mufti Menk handles it the way a careful man handles something precious: he gives you what is sound, flags what is not, and never dresses a guess as a fact.
The son who stayed close
Of all Adam's children, Shith was the one who stayed close. He sat at his father's feet and learned from him, obeyed his instructions, and then turned and did for the others what Adam had done for him: he reminded. He reminded his brothers, his nephews, the grandchildren coming up behind them, and there was only one thing to remind them of, because at the dawn of the world there was nothing else yet to say. Worship Allah alone. Remember that the devil made a promise against you. Hold the line your father held.
Mufti Menk notes that Shith is not mentioned in the Qur'an at all. What we know of him comes through the Sunnah. There is a narration that Allah revealed one hundred and four scriptures across the prophets, and that fifty of them were given to Shith, peace be upon him. So this quiet son was not only a keeper of his father's words; he was a prophet in his own right, handed pages of revelation to guide the first generations of humankind. The trust was not buried with Adam. It was passed on.
Two roads out of one family
The family did not all walk the same way. One of Adam's sons, the one whose name comes down to us as Qabil, the brother who had committed that first murder, was a hard man: aggressive, greedy, proud, difficult to be near. He took his own household and left, away from the rest, down out of the mountains where Adam and Shith and the faithful lived, and out onto the open flatland of the valley. Two roads now ran out of one family, and they were drifting apart.
Then came a command, part of the sacred law given to Shith, peace be upon him: the people of the mountain were not to mix with the people who had gone down to the valley. And they obeyed. Mufti Menk is careful to mark the line between what is established and what is not here, so take the detail as he gives it: the believers kept their distance, and by keeping it, they were largely kept safe. Put that question into your own life, he says, because it never stopped being asked. When you are told to keep certain company at arm's length, the first thing the heart wants to know is, what is so wrong with them? Hold that thought. It is about to be answered the hard way.
The promise the devil never forgot
وَٱسْتَفْزِزْ مَنِ ٱسْتَطَعْتَ مِنْهُم بِصَوْتِكَ وَأَجْلِبْ عَلَيْهِم بِخَيْلِكَ وَرَجِلِكَ وَشَارِكْهُمْ فِى ٱلْأَمْوَٰلِ وَٱلْأَوْلَٰدِ وَعِدْهُمْ ۚ وَمَا يَعِدُهُمُ ٱلشَّيْطَٰنُ إِلَّا غُرُورًا
“And incite [to senselessness] whoever you can among them with your voice and assault them with your horses and foot soldiers and become a partner in their wealth and their children and promise them." But Satan does not promise them except delusion.”
Surah al-Isra 17:64 Read 17:64 with tafsir
Back when he refused to bow to Adam, the devil had sworn an oath: give me time, and I will lead them astray. And Allah had let him try. Mufti Menk points to where Allah records the licence given to him, in Surah al-Isra: go, incite whoever you can of them with your voice, drive your cavalry and your infantry at them, share with them in their wealth and their children, and make them promises. But the devil promises nothing except delusion.
Every word of it is a weapon, and Mufti Menk walks through them. The voice, his sound: the scholars of tafsir, he says, almost all of them read it as music and musical instruments, the sound that gets inside a person and pulls the strings. To share in wealth means to teach a man how to earn from the forbidden. To share in children means to pull people toward illicit desire. Read the verse and you are reading a battle plan that was filed away at the beginning of time and never thrown out. The same one is aimed at you. And there is a mercy folded into it: the verse ends by telling you the promises are empty, so you would know the enemy before he ever knocks.
A stranger comes to the valley
Here Mufti Menk turns to what the historians and earlier generations relate, and he is plain that it is not something we build our belief on; he tells it because the lesson inside it is real, the way the Qur'an itself points to a former age of ignorance without giving us every detail. So receive it as he does, as an old account carrying a true warning, not as creed.
The devil decided he would not waste his effort on the faithful up the mountain, who knew him and would not follow. He would go down to the valley instead, to Qabil's people. He came among them disguised as a man, a handsome one, pretending he had defected from the other side, and he asked them for work. They took him in. And he was patient. He worked hard, he won their trust, and then, slowly, he began to make sounds no human ear had ever heard. He fashioned a small drum and beat it, and the people came running, what is that? He took a piece of metal and struck it, and they gathered. He made a horn and blew into it, and they crowded around, delighted, certain these clever newcomers had raced ahead of everyone else. Saturday evening became the night they all came together for the sound, and they gave themselves to it until the commands of Allah began to slip quietly out of their minds.
Not everything that glitters
وَقَرْنَ فِى بُيُوتِكُنَّ وَلَا تَبَرَّجْنَ تَبَرُّجَ ٱلْجَٰهِلِيَّةِ ٱلْأُولَىٰ ۖ وَأَقِمْنَ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَءَاتِينَ ٱلزَّكَوٰةَ وَأَطِعْنَ ٱللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُۥٓ ۚ إِنَّمَا يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ لِيُذْهِبَ عَنكُمُ ٱلرِّجْسَ أَهْلَ ٱلْبَيْتِ وَيُطَهِّرَكُمْ تَطْهِيرًا
“And abide in your houses and do not display yourselves as [was] the display of the former times of ignorance. And establish prayer and give zakāh and obey Allāh and His Messenger. Allāh intends only to remove from you the impurity [of sin], O people of the [Prophet's] household, and to purify you with [extensive] purification.”
Surah al-Ahzab 33:33 Read 33:33 with tafsir
Up the mountain, the young ones heard about it. They had been asking, after all, what is so wrong with our cousins down there? Unsatisfied with the answer, a few of them slipped down just to look. They did not go intending evil. But from a distance they saw the lights and the music and the celebration, and they saw the women, and it pulled them. They went closer, and they were seen, and the women began to make themselves up and put themselves on display to draw the men in. This adorning to be looked at has a name, tabarruj, and Mufti Menk reaches for the verse in Surah al-Ahzab where Allah tells the believing women not to flaunt themselves the way of the former age of ignorance. Ibn Abbas, he relates, explained that the former ignorance referred to here was this very thing, the women of Qabil's side beautifying themselves to lure the men.
So the youth who came to watch stayed to take part, and went home and told the others what they were missing, and the next time the group was larger, and larger again. With the music came the loss of the gaze, and with the loss of the gaze came the first adultery the world had seen, sin learned by being shown how. This, Mufti Menk says, is the whole shape of the trap: the devil rules through the sound and through the eye, and a thing can glitter and pull and still be poison. Not everything attractive is good for you. Some of the brightest invitations lead straight down off the mountain.
Everything you see is a test
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ لَيَبْلُوَنَّكُمُ ٱللَّهُ بِشَىْءٍ مِّنَ ٱلصَّيْدِ تَنَالُهُۥٓ أَيْدِيكُمْ وَرِمَاحُكُمْ لِيَعْلَمَ ٱللَّهُ مَن يَخَافُهُۥ بِٱلْغَيْبِ ۚ فَمَنِ ٱعْتَدَىٰ بَعْدَ ذَٰلِكَ فَلَهُۥ عَذَابٌ أَلِيمٌ
“O you who have believed, Allāh will surely test you through something of the game that your hands and spears [can] reach, that Allāh may make evident those who fear Him unseen. And whoever transgresses after that - for him is a painful punishment.”
Surah al-Ma'idah 5:94 Read 5:94 with tafsir
Why was any of this allowed at all? Because that is the answer to why we are here. Adam, peace be upon him, had asked his Lord's forgiveness and been sent down to a world built to be a test, and the devil's licence is part of that test. Everything you see, Mufti Menk says, is an examination from Allah, a thing put within reach to see whether you will fear Him when no one is watching. He points to the pilgrim in ihram, whom Allah tells plainly: I will test you with game that your very hands and spears can reach, the animal coming so close it seems to say hunt me, forbidden to you only so that the One who fears Allah unseen becomes known. He recalls the Sabbath people too, forbidden to fish on their day, and the fish that surfaced on exactly that day as if to taunt them, until they schemed to set their nets on Friday and lift them on Sunday and pretend they had kept the law.
The sin is within reach. It is committable. Whether your hand closes on it comes down to one thing, how much of Allah is in your heart. The one who can get your finger tapping to a beat, Mufti Menk warns, can get it doing far worse, because it begins with the small surrender and grows. So the test is not a cruelty laid on us; it is the entire point of the journey. Adam's children learned that on the mountain and in the valley, and we are still sitting the same exam, in our own valleys, with our own bright sounds.
The door that never closes
وَٱلَّذِينَ إِذَا فَعَلُوا۟ فَٰحِشَةً أَوْ ظَلَمُوٓا۟ أَنفُسَهُمْ ذَكَرُوا۟ ٱللَّهَ فَٱسْتَغْفَرُوا۟ لِذُنُوبِهِمْ وَمَن يَغْفِرُ ٱلذُّنُوبَ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ وَلَمْ يُصِرُّوا۟ عَلَىٰ مَا فَعَلُوا۟ وَهُمْ يَعْلَمُونَ
“And those who, when they commit an immorality or wrong themselves [by transgression], remember Allāh and seek forgiveness for their sins - and who can forgive sins except Allāh? - and [who] do not persist in what they have done while they know.”
Surah Aali Imran 3:135 Read 3:135 with tafsir
أُو۟لَٰٓئِكَ جَزَآؤُهُم مَّغْفِرَةٌ مِّن رَّبِّهِمْ وَجَنَّٰتٌ تَجْرِى مِن تَحْتِهَا ٱلْأَنْهَٰرُ خَٰلِدِينَ فِيهَا ۚ وَنِعْمَ أَجْرُ ٱلْعَٰمِلِينَ
“Those - their reward is forgiveness from their Lord and gardens beneath which rivers flow [in Paradise], wherein they will abide eternally; and excellent is the reward of the [righteous] workers.”
Surah Aali Imran 3:136 Read 3:136 with tafsir
And then, after all that descent, Mufti Menk lands the story exactly where the Qur'an lands so many: on hope. Those who fall into immorality, who wrong their own souls, and then remember Allah and seek His forgiveness, and do not stubbornly go on knowing what they are doing, their reward is forgiveness from their Lord and gardens beneath which rivers flow, to stay in forever. He calls these among the most hope-filled verses in the whole Book. No one, he insists, is ever beyond repair. Allah gives a chance, and another, and ten more, and we do not know how many are left, so the only wise thing is to grab the one in your hand now and turn.
Do not wait, he pleads, for the heart attack that finally makes a man drop his bad habit overnight on a doctor's one word, when the Lord of all the worlds has been telling him to drop it for years. Some of the youth on the mountain came down and were lost. But the door Allah holds open in this verse was open to them too, as it is open to you tonight, no matter how far down the valley you think you have wandered. The trust Shith carried was this very message: come back to Allah, He is waiting.
A flame passed hand to hand, all the way to him ﷺ
Step back and see what Shith actually is in the long story. He is a link. Prophethood did not end with Adam and it did not end with Shith; it was handed on, father to son, generation to generation, fifty scriptures here and more to come, each prophet keeping the one message alive and passing it forward like a flame cupped against the wind. That chain runs the entire length of this series, from Adam through Nuh and Ibrahim and Musa and Isa, and it does not stop until it reaches the hand it was always travelling toward: Muhammad ﷺ, the final Messenger, who received the last and complete revelation and after whom the pages were sealed. The same call Shith made to a handful of people on a mountain, there is One God, worship Him alone, is the call that filled the Qur'an.
And now look at where the flame is. He ﷺ said, convey from me even if it is one verse. The chain that ran from Adam to Shith to all the prophets to the Prophet ﷺ did not end with him either; it runs on to you. You are the one keeping it now. So the simplest way to honour Shith, the son who sat at his father's feet and then refused to let the message die, is to do the small, unglamorous thing he did: hold the line, keep the gaze, fear Allah when no one is watching, and pass on what you were given. Read one verse to someone tomorrow. That is the trust, still moving, still in living hands, still yours.