Foundation  /  Al-Arbaʿūn al-Nawawiyya  /  Hadith 1

Actions are by intentions

إِنَّمَا الْأَعْمَالُ بِالنِّيَّاتِ، وَإِنَّمَا لِكُلِّ امْرِئٍ مَا نَوَى، فَمَنْ كَانَتْ هِجْرَتُهُ إِلَى اللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِ فَهِجْرَتُهُ إِلَى اللَّهِ وَرَسُولِهِ، وَمَنْ كَانَتْ هِجْرَتُهُ لِدُنْيَا يُصِيبُهَا أَوِ امْرَأَةٍ يَنْكِحُهَا فَهِجْرَتُهُ إِلَى مَا هَاجَرَ إِلَيْهِ

Innamā l-aʿmālu bi-n-niyyāt, wa-innamā li-kulli mriʾin mā nawā. Fa-man kānat hijratuhu ilā Llāhi wa-rasūlih, fa-hijratuhu ilā Llāhi wa-rasūlih. Wa-man kānat hijratuhu li-dunyā yuṣībuhā aw imraʾatin yankiḥuhā, fa-hijratuhu ilā mā hājara ilayh.

“Actions are only by intentions, and every person shall have only what they intended. So whoever’s migration was to God and His Messenger, their migration is to God and His Messenger; and whoever’s migration was for some worldly thing to gain, or a woman to marry, their migration is to whatever they migrated to.”

Translation by Alyph Academy. We translate rather than reprint: the classical Arabic is public domain, published English translations are not.

Reading notes

• The opening word restricts. إنَّما (innamā) is a particle of restriction — grammarians classify it as an instrument of ḥaṣr, affirming one thing and excluding its opposite. The hadith does not say that intention helps an action. It confines the action to the intention.
• Something is left unsaid, and commentators argue about what. Read literally, “actions are by intentions” is not yet a complete claim — a word is elided. Some commentators supply valid: an act performed without intention does not count as the act at all. Others supply rewarded: the act stands, but earns nothing. The difference is not academic; it changes what happens to an act done absent-mindedly.
• Two clauses doing two different jobs. The first ties an act to the presence of intention. The second ties the outcome to the content of the intention. One is about whether the act counts; the other about which act it was.
• The migration example is the test case. Two people make the same journey, endure the same hardship, arrive the same day. Externally the acts are identical. The hadith says they are not the same act at all.
• Its placement is deliberate, twice over. Al-Nawawī opens with it; so does al-Bukhārī, who begins the entire Ṣaḥīḥ with this hadith. Beginning a collection with intention frames everything after it — including the reader’s own reason for reading.
• A caution about a famous story. Commentaries often attach a report about a man who migrated to marry a woman called Umm Qays, and say the hadith was occasioned by him. That report is transmitted separately; its connection to this hadith is an inference by later commentators, not part of the text.

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