As for the person who falls under both the divine promise and the divine threat, the position of the Companions, the Successors, and the mainstream Sunni community is that he is liable to both reward and punishment. Thus, if Allah punishes him for his sins for as long as He wills, He will afterward bring out of the Fire anyone whose heart contains even the weight of a grain of faith.

In contrast, the Khārijites and the Muʿtazilites recognize only two categories: one who deserves the promise alone—fully blessed and never punished—or one who deserves only the threat—fully punished and never blessed. We have discussed their doctrine in detail elsewhere; for this reason they espouse absolute iḥbāṭ (total nullification of deeds) that leaves no good deed intact.

Since the textual evidence and the consensus of the early generations confirm that there are people who will both be blessed and punished, and that they still possess some faith, consider a person with many good deeds and many sins: his sins cancel out an equivalent portion of his good deeds, and if the sins outweigh the good he enters the Fire. Yet the predominance of sins does not mean that every good deed has vanished so that he is left with none, as happens with the disbelievers. What is weighed are the deeds themselves in their concrete form, and their records show that he still has both good and evil deeds.

Whoever has no good deeds at all finds his scale utterly light, for nothing weighs it down. Heaviness and lightness pertain only to the good deeds: a person prospers when their pan is heavy and loses when it is light. Conversely, if there are pure good deeds with no sins set against them, that pan will be exceedingly heavy.