He replied, “There is no sin on you if you leave it off, for Allah has already written down everything He will create until the Day of Resurrection.”

Muslim relates in his Ṣaḥīḥ, on the authority of Jābir, that a man once came to the Prophet—peace and blessings be upon him—and said, “I have a slave-girl who serves us and irrigates our palm-groves. I have relations with her, yet I dislike that she should become pregnant.” The Prophet said, “Practice ʿazl with her if you wish, for whatever has been decreed for her will surely reach her.”

This is so even though Allah—exalted is He—is able to create a human being without parents, as He created Adam; or from a father alone, as He created Eve from Adam’s short rib; or from a mother alone, as He created the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, peace be upon him. He simply brought those beings into existence through other, extraordinary means.

Although blatant denial of this truth is found only among the zanādiqa—heretical freethinkers who set aside the revealed laws—many people, including a number of respected shaykhs, slip into a subtler form of the same error. One of them will abandon careful observance of the commands and prohibitions, letting himself drift with the decree, and he will regard this as the proper meaning of entrusting matters to Allah and relying upon Him. He imagines that the saying, “The servant should be with Allah like a corpse in the hands of the living,” entails giving up action based on divine command and prohibition, so that he neglects what he has been ordered to do and commits what he has been forbidden, until the light and the criterion within him—by which he distinguishes what Allah has commanded, loves, and is pleased with from what He has forbidden, abhors, and condemns—grow weak. Thus he equates things that Allah Himself has set apart.

Allah the Exalted says in Sūrah al-Jāthiyah: “Or do those who commit evil deeds imagine that We shall treat them like those who believe and do righteous deeds—equal in their life and their death? How bad is the judgment they make!”

And in Sūrah al-Qalam: “Shall We make those who submit themselves (the Muslims) like the criminals? What is wrong with you—how do you judge?”

And in Sūrah Ṣād: “Shall We treat those who believe and do righteous deeds like those who spread corruption on earth? Or shall We make the God-fearing like the wicked?”

And in Sūrah al-Zumar: “Say, ‘Are those who know equal to those who do not know?’”

And He says: “The blind and the seeing are not alike, nor are the shadows and the heat, nor the darknesses and the light; the living and the dead are not equal. Allah makes whom He wills hear, but you cannot make those in the graves hear.”

Verses of this purport are many. Yet the extremists continue until they lose the ability to distinguish between the prophetic, divine, discriminating, legal command—established by the Book and the Sunnah—and the various states and occurrences that appear at the hands of unbelievers and wicked people. They perceive only the aspect of unification: that everything falls under Allah’s decree, His predestination, His lordship, and His universal will, and that nothing lies outside His dominion. They fail to perceive the aspect of differentiation whereby Allah has distinguished His friends from His enemies, the righteous from the wicked, the believers from the disbelievers, and the people of obedience—who comply with His religious command—from the people of disobedience, who defy that command.