“O ʿAbbās, uncle of the Messenger of Allah, I can avail you nothing against Allah. O Ṣafiyyah, aunt of the Messenger of Allah, I can avail you nothing against Allah. Ask me for whatever you wish of my wealth.”

In this there is a warning to everyone who traces himself to any of those three not to be deceived by lineage and then abandon good words and righteous deeds.

Here, too, is evidence that hating the Arabs as a people and showing hostility toward them constitutes disbelief—or at the very least leads to it. The implication is that they are superior to others and that loving them strengthens one’s faith. Had the prohibition of hating them been merely like the prohibition of hating any other group, it would not have been made a cause of leaving the religion or of hating the Messenger; it would have been classified only as a form of aggression. But since it was deemed a cause of apostasy and of hatred for the Messenger, this shows that hatred for them is graver than hatred for others. That, in turn, proves their greater virtue, for love and hate correlate with merit: the more serious the offense of hating a people, the higher their rank. Accordingly, loving them is itself an act of religion because of the added merit it brings.