Second Category: clarifying the Lawgiver’s intent in framing the Sharia so that legal obligations are confined to what people can actually do and do not entail undue hardship. This category comprises several issues:

Issue One: The principles of jurisprudence affirm that the very condition—or cause—of legal responsibility is the agent’s ability to perform the act. Accordingly, whatever lies beyond a person’s capacity cannot, in the sight of the Sharia, be made obligatory, even though it may be conceivable in pure reason. Hence, in-born dispositions such as the appetite for food and drink are not required to be uprooted, for that would amount to imposing the impossible.

Issue Two: No one is legally charged with what he cannot bear. Qualities over which a person has no control—whether in acquiring them or dispelling them—are of two kinds:

1. Those that arise as the consequence of one’s actions, such as knowledge and love.
2. Those that are innate and not the result of action, such as courage, cowardice, and forbearance.

With regard to the first kind, it is clear that recompense attaches to them in general, since they are effects traceable to voluntary, acquired causes. As for the second kind—the inborn traits—they are considered from two angles:
(a) whether they are beloved or disliked by the Lawgiver; and
(b) whether a reward is granted for them or not.

As for the first angle, the explicit scriptural evidence indicates that love and hate do pertain to such traits. Concerning the second, love and hate can legitimately be directed to persons themselves, and persons are even further removed from actions than attributes are. Allah the Exalted says, “Then Allah will bring a people whom He loves and who love Him” (Q 5:54). It is impermissible here to claim that only their deeds are meant; by the same token, when love is apparently directed to attributes, one cannot insist that only actions are intended.

Once this is established, it follows that love and hate may also pertain to actions, as in His words, “Allah does not like the public utterance of evil speech, except by one who has been wronged” (Q 4:148), His words, “Yet Allah disliked their setting forth” (Q 9:46), and the Prophet’s statement, “The most detested of lawful things to Allah is divorce.”