Īmān: Speech and Action, Its Increase and Decrease, and the Refutation of the Murjiʾah and the Khawārij

“Īmān is one thing: if part of it goes, all of it goes”

The response

Ibn Taymiyyah gave the root of the whole dispute:

He has given their position. He next states what their whole argument comes to.

He stated their argument in the next passage:

The Prophet ﷺ has already answered this, when he named its branches and spoke of the atom’s weight of it. The word “ten” is the name of a number and has no degrees. The word “īmān” is like the word “tree” or “prayer” or “man”. A tree that loses a branch is still a tree. A man who loses a hand is still a man, and a deficient one. Some of the parts are such that the thing does not survive them, as a tree does not survive the loss of its root or a man the loss of his head, and so with the testimony and with the action of the heart. Others are completions, and others again are ornaments. For that reason the Prophet ﷺ spoke of the highest and the lowest. As for a man’s being a believer by what he has of īmān and having some branch of kufr, Allah said of a group of people, “And most of them do not believe in Allah except while they associate partners with Him”, and the Prophet ﷺ spoke of four traits which make a person a pure hypocrite, and of those who have one of them.

“The one who commits a major sin is a disbeliever”

The response

Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī recorded their doctrine in Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn:

The replies come from the texts given above, and they cannot be evaded. Allah called the two fighting parties believers and brothers. He called the killer the brother of the man he killed in the verse of retaliation, and a disbeliever is no one’s brother in faith. The law has prescribed lashing for the drinker and the fornicator and cutting off the hand of the thief. If these acts were apostasy, the penalty would be death, and the Prophet ﷺ would not have prayed for those who were punished. And the people who said “lā ilāhah illā Allāh” come out of the Fire with an atom’s weight, so the Fire is not everlasting for them.

As for the Muʿtazilah, who say that he has left īmān without entering kufr and yet abides in the Fire forever, they have invented a place between two places which the Book does not know, and then they have given him the same end as the Khawārij do. So they differ from them in the name and agree with them in the result.

“Īmān is knowledge of Allah only”

The response

Al-Ashʿarī recorded it in Maqālāt al-Islāmiyyīn:

On this doctrine Iblīs is a believer, for he knows his Lord and has addressed Him and sworn by His power. Pharaoh is a believer, for Allah said of Pharaoh’s people, “And they denied them, while their souls were convinced of them, out of oppression and arrogance”. The Jews who “recognise him as they recognise their own sons” are believers. And Abū Ṭālib, who knew that his nephew was truthful, and died refusing to say the testimony. Wakīʿ said that this is disbelief, as has been quoted above, and Aḥmad said the same of whoever says that intention suffices in place of action.

“Īmān is only belief in the heart, for that is what the word means in Arabic”

The response

Al-Bāqillānī said in al-Tamhīd:

He rests the entire doctrine upon two premises, as Ibn Taymiyyah says of those who argue this way (Kitāb al-Īmān, p. 227): that īmān is a synonym of taṣdīq, and that the Sharīʿah did not add to it. The first has been answered at the start of this chapter, and neither the grammar nor the usage supports it. As for his proof from the verse of Yūsuf, Ibn Taymiyyah points out that the sense being acceptable in that one place does not make the words synonyms, and that the whole of the religion is not to be built upon one word in one sūrah when the meaning of īmān has been transmitted by the whole ummah through its acts and teaching.

The second premise contradicts what al-Bāqillānī himself must accept. Prayer in the language means supplication, zakāh means growth and ḥajj means intending. No one says that the Arabs’ language was reversed by the Sharīʿah, and no one says that the man who supplicates has thereby prayed. The Prophet ﷺ himself explained īmān by the branches, and Allah called prayer īmān in the verse of the qiblah. And there is the question which this doctrine cannot answer: is the man a believer who says, “I hold in my heart that Muḥammad is the Messenger of Allah”, and curses him with his tongue and refuses him, while under no compulsion? On their premise he has lost nothing that belongs to īmān. So they have to say that his cursing is only a sign that the belief has gone. And that is a claim about what is in his heart which they do not know, made to escape what they have said.

Note also the lesser of the two: al-Ḥumaydī reported that some people said that whoever acknowledges prayer, zakāh, fasting and ḥajj and does none of them until he dies is a believer, and he said:

Ibn Taymiyyah reports:

“Īmān is acknowledgement with the tongue and belief in the heart”

The response

Al-Ṭaḥāwī said in his creed:

Such is the irjāʾ of the jurists, which must be kept apart from the irjāʾ of Jahm. The people who held it did not say that sins do no harm. They say that deeds are obligatory, that the sinner is under threat, and that the Fire will take some of them. So the difference with them is less than with the others, and Ibn Taymiyyah gave its measure:

He said in Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā:

So both extremes are mistakes: to call them disbelievers, and to treat the matter as a dispute over words which does no harm. The Salaf were severe with this saying because of what it opened. Once deeds are outside of īmān, it can be said that a man’s īmān is like the īmān of Jibrīl, whatever he does, and the texts on the branches and on the increase have to be explained away. The Ṭaḥāwī creed adds that īmān is one and that its people are equal in its root, and the verses already quoted say otherwise, as do the grains and the atom. The reply to them is what has been given: the verses of al-Anfāl and al-Baqarah, the ḥadīth of the branches, and the consensus reported by al-Shāfiʿī and Isḥāq.

“Major shirk committed in ignorance leaves its doer a Muslim”

The response

Every part of this question rests on a distinction which the claim above erases. Ignorance of a fine matter is one thing, and ignorance of what the Messengers were sent with is another. A man’s saying “I did not know” has a place in the first and none in the second, since the Messengers came with nothing before tawḥīd. Allah made the sending of the Messenger the end of every excuse, and the proof of the claimant, the verse of the Messenger’s sending, is the first proof against him.

Allah, the Exalted, said in Sūrat al-Isrāʾ:

So the sending of the Messenger ends the excuse. The next verse says how that sending reaches a person who never met him.

And He said in Sūrat al-Anʿām:

“And whomever it reaches.” The Qurʾān is the warning, and its reaching a person is the arrival of the warning. Sulaymān ibn Saḥmān of the Najdī daʿwah traced the error of the claimants to its source, a misreading of Ibn Taymiyyah.

Sulaymān ibn Saḥmān said in Tamyīz al-Ṣidq min al-Mayn:

His proof from the Christians is unanswerable on the claimant’s own terms. If ignorance excused from the worship of other than Allah, it would excuse the ignorant Christian who prays to the Messiah in good faith, and no Muslim says that. Then he names the acts in question.

And he said:

He has spoken of doubt. He then names the acts themselves.

And he said:

And he pressed the reductio to its end, asking whether anything other than error in this door brought the people of incarnation and union to where they stand, what brought the Qarāmiṭah to where they stood, and what brought the Rāfiḍah to the worship of the twelve imams. Each of them had a mistaken ijtihād to plead. If error excuses in the worship of other than Allah, it excuses all of them.

What of a person who lives among Muslims and hears the Qurʾān recited? The rule is that the ignorance which excuses is the ignorance of something fine and hidden, of the kind that such a person would not know; whoever lives among Muslims is not excused in what is plain, and whoever is able to ask and does not ask is not excused. The ignorant are further divided. That final class is very rare in a land where the muṣḥaf is sold in the market. And the man who sought aid from the Prophet ﷺ in ignorance and never repented, if he continued upon that belief without repenting, remains upon his shirk though he prayed and fasted, because a nullifier voids the deeds until there is repentance, as the verse of Sūrat al-Zumar states:

Allah, the Exalted, said in Sūrat al-Zumar:

The strongest text the claimant brings is an answer from within the daʿwah itself, and it has to be set out as it stands, because Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh the son of the Imām gave it plainly and his question was precisely this one.

Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb was asked about one from whom disbelief proceeded in ignorance, and he answered:

The same answer concludes with the sentence that decides how it is to be read:

He said:

On the one who circles a grave without knowing that it is shirk, two statements of the people of knowledge are reported, and Ibn Taymiyyah and others mentioned both. On the first, he is excused in that state, misled as he is by scholars of evil who dress shirk up for him, and he has the ruling of the people of the interval; this is attributed to Shaykh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, who said that he declares no one a disbeliever until the proof is established. On the second, no one is excused after the sending of the Messenger, for the Messenger has been sent, the Qurʾān has come down, it is recited, and its texts on shirk are clear. Mark what the first statement grants: this man is still dealt with in this world as the mushrikūn are dealt with. He is not washed, not prayed over and not buried in the graves of the Muslims.

So here is what is left of the claim. It said that he remains a Muslim. Neither of the two statements says so. The most that the first statement gives him is the suspension of the final judgement and the ruling of the people of the interval, while in this world he is treated as a mushrik. The second statement, which is the one this chapter holds, gives him not even that, for the reasons Ibn Saḥmān gives and the verse of Sūrat al-Isrāʾ states: the Messenger has been sent and the Qurʾān has reached him. The one who prays toward the Kaʿbah and calls on the man in the tomb has heard “And do not call, besides Allah”, or he has refused to hear it. A person is called a mushrik because of what he does, and it is his deed which gives him the name, just as the one who commits adultery is called an adulterer before anyone has told him the penalty.

As for the man who ordered his family to burn him, he is the first proof they reach for, and it does not help them. Ibn Saḥmān answers that this man doubted a detail of Allah’s power while being a muwaḥḥid and no mushrik, since the report says that he did no good at all except tawḥīd. It was a fine matter that was hidden from him, and what drove him was fear and not obstinacy. He called on no one but Allah, he feared Allah alone, and he was forgiven out of the very tawḥīd that the claimant’s client has abandoned. And when the Companions asked for Dhāt Anwāṭ, they asked before doing, and they stopped when they were told.

One thing remains, and the Najdī answer that gives it does not soften the ruling. For the one who died upon these acts before anyone told him, the answer in al-Rasāʾil wa-l-Masāʾil al-Najdiyyah says that the best reply is that Allah knows best about them, as Mūsā said of the former generations, and it gives this reason:

It says in al-Rasāʾil wa-l-Masāʾil al-Najdiyyah:

That passage describes the claimant’s client exactly: his religion is what the people of his land are upon, and he does not ask. The search that would have cost him one question was always open to him. Ignorance of that kind is a sin in itself, and it is no shelter from a greater one.

Declaring a specific person a disbeliever, and carrying out any consequence of it, belongs to scholars and to courts with their conditions. It is not open to every reader of this chapter. That does not touch the ruling on the deed or the name of the one who does it, and it gives no one leave to call that deed Islam.

The same point was made by a jurist far from the Najdī daʿwah. Al-Nawawī the Shāfiʿī said in explaining the ḥadīth of Jābir, as the commentator quotes him:

Al-Nawawī said, as quoted in Fatḥ al-Majīd:

“Between the one who disbelieves out of obstinacy and anyone else.” And “one who ascribes himself to it”. These two clauses address exactly the man whom the claim wished to exclude.

The words of Shaykh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb in Kashf al-Shubuhāt are the plainest statement of the position this chapter holds.

Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb said in Kashf al-Shubuhāt:

“Ignorant” here has been read as ignorance of the degree of the ruling. A person knows that the word is foul and vile and says only that he did not know it was disbelief, and that plea does not help him, just as someone who knows a sin is forbidden gets no excuse by saying that he did not know it was major. Distinct from that are those who asked Mūsā for a god, and the Companions who asked for Dhāt Anwāṭ. They asked in ignorance and with good intention, they came seeking guidance, they did nothing, and they stopped when they were told; and so they did not disbelieve. Had they actually taken an idol they would have disbelieved, and the Muslim who speaks of such a thing is rebuked sternly. The plea tries to erase that line, between a question that was asked and an act that was done.

Apostasy divides into what admits no excuse, such as denying the existence of Allah and declaring the Messenger ﷺ a liar, for which the person is ruled a disbeliever in every case because what he denied is the greatest of necessary truths; and what admits the excuse of ignorance or interpretation, such as denying some of what the Messenger ﷺ brought of reports and laws, for which he is not ruled a disbeliever until the proof is established, because of the possibilities that lead to the denial, such as the proofs being obscure. So the disagreement concerns where each act falls under this division. Calling upon other than Allah is neither a fine question nor an obscure proof. It is what the Qurʾān was sent down to end.