ALLAH Or Qismat By Syeda Zukhruf Fatima

About this novelette

Allah Aur Qismat (Urdu: اللہ اور قسمت) by Syeda Zukhruf Fatima is an Urdu novel about Khadim, a man from Bhakkar who has suffered for decades. Through all those years of hardship he has never stopped thanking Allah, and the novel asks what that faith gives him in return.

The writer introduces the story herself. Some people spend their whole lives in pain because they never find love, she says, but this man found love and still lived through great hardship. He is now seventy-five years old, and his fate only became kind to him after forty years. His test is still going on, and he has passed half of it. These trials, she stresses, come not from people but from Allah. We lose patience over a year or two of difficulty, while he has seen sixty-five years of pain and is still grateful. She hopes the novel will guide readers to live according to Islam, that they’ll see others’ suffering next to their own and choose shukr over complaint.

Episode 1 begins with Zainab, pale and frail like a scattered yellow leaf, wrapped in her chadar and waiting at the door for her husband. Khadim, wheat-complexioned and weighed down by years of trouble and fate, stops at the threshold lost in thought. “Khadim, what is it? Why are you so worried?” Her voice pulls him back. He had been thinking that after three operations in different parts of Pakistan, she is going for a fourth, and the cancer is still not getting better.

زینب کی بیماری، خادم کی محبت، اور ہر حال میں اللہ کا شکر۔

Zainab tells him not to lose hope; she is sure Allah will send some messiah for sinners like them. In the rickshaw on the way to the station, Khadim thinks about how he has sold every belonging for his wife’s treatment; now only a roof over their heads remains. He doesn’t even have the fare – he had to borrow money for the train tickets. If his heart hadn’t been set on finding a cure for her cancer, he would have given up long ago and lived on like a walking corpse. But he thanks Allah: Zainab, the light of his eyes and the balm for his wounds, keeps him alive. Without her, he could never have passed such a test.

This is a heartfelt, faith-centred story about patience, illness and a husband’s devotion, written with a clear moral message about gratitude.

You can read Allah Aur Qismat online here or download the complete PDF for free. You may also like Mohabbat Aur Sakoon by Usama Ansari and Kafir Aur Musalman, or browse more short novels and novelettes.