3. The third kind is the remedy of the religion: the knowledge of hadith together with the science of legal verdicts (fatwā). Whenever an unforeseen matter befalls a servant, he needs someone able to cure it for him—just as Ibn Masʿūd remarked.

4. The fourth kind is the disease of the religion: the newly-invented speculative kalām.

5. And the fifth is the ruin of the religion: the study of magic and whatever resembles it.

Thus health is preserved by what is akin to it, and illness is removed by its opposite—whether we are speaking of the body’s natural disorders or of the heart’s psychological, religious, and juridical maladies.

The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “Every child is born upon the fitrah; then his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian, just as an animal gives birth to a perfectly whole offspring—do you see any of them born with a severed ear?” Abu Hurayrah would then say, “Recite, if you wish, the verse: ‘The fitrah of Allah upon which He has created mankind’” (al-Rūm 30:30). The two Ṣaḥīḥs record this hadith.

The Exalted also says (al-Rūm 30:26–30):
“Unto Him belongs all who are in the heavens and on earth; all are devoutly obedient to Him. He it is Who originates creation and then brings it back, and that is even easier for Him. His is the highest likeness in the heavens and the earth… Yet those who do wrong follow their own desires without knowledge… So set your face toward the religion, turning purely to Him—the fitrah of Allah upon which He has created mankind. There is no altering the creation of Allah; that is the upright religion, but most people do not know.”

Allah therefore informs us that He fashioned His servants to set their faces toward Him in pure devotion—that is, to worship Allah alone with no partner. This is one of the heart’s sound, natural, straight, and balanced movements; to abandon it is a grave injustice, for its people then follow their whims without knowledge.

This fitrah, this original constitution—which is the very health of one’s creation—needs strength and nourishment that resemble what already exists within it, in both knowledge and action. Hence the religion reaches completion when the fitrah is perfected by the revealed sharia, the banquet of Allah. As the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said in the hadith of Ibn Masʿūd: “Every host loves that his banquet be attended, and the banquet of Allah is the Quran.” The Quran is like the water Allah sends down from the sky, as both the Book and the Sunnah repeatedly illustrate.

Those who distort the fitrah and turn the heart away from its uprightness are people who sicken and debilitate hearts. Yet Allah has sent down His Book as a healing for what is in the breasts. Whatever affliction strikes a believer in this world is like pain that seizes the body: through it the body becomes sound and its harmful humors are expelled. The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “No fatigue, nor illness, nor anxiety, nor sorrow, nor grief, nor hurt—even the prick of a thorn—befalls a believer except that Allah thereby expiates some of his sins.”

This actualizes His words: “Whoever does evil will be recompensed for it” (al-Nisāʾ 4:123).

Whoever is not purified of these diseases in this world will need to be purified of them in the Hereafter; Allah will chastise him like a man in whose body the bad humors have accumulated because he never used medicine to reduce them, until they gather and bring about his destruction. Hence the tradition says: When people say of a sick person, “O Allah, have mercy on him,” Allah replies, “How can I show him mercy by removing something through which I am already showing him mercy?” And the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said