Guarding the tongue

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Guarding the tongue is, for Ibn Rajab, the controlling element of all religious practice: in Mu'adh's hadith, after the gates of good and the head-pillar-peak of the matter, the Prophet asked 'shall I tell you of what controls all of that?', took hold of his own tongue and said 'restrain this', and when Mu'adh asked whether people are taken to account for their speech he answered 'may your mother be bereft of you — are people thrown onto their faces, or their nostrils, in the Fire for anything but the harvest of their tongues?'; it stands alongside Abu Hurayra's 'whoever believes in God and the Last Day let him speak good or keep silent' (hadith 15) and the Prophet's gesture to his own tongue when Sufyan al-Thaqafi asked what to guard against (hadith 21) — one organ whose harvest is the commonest cause of people being pitched into the Fire, as the repeated hadiths of the Forty declare.