fabricate lies against Allah, and such a person is certainly not one of Allah’s messengers. Whoever fabricates a lie against Allah is thus unmasked as a false claimant to prophethood. Statements of this sort can never serve as proof about Allah, for it is already known that Allah did not send him. Should he utter something that happens to be true, that truth is accepted only in the same way any other person’s true remark would be accepted—not because he has transmitted it from Allah, nor because he is a messenger of Allah. It is accepted just as one might accept a true statement from idol-worshippers or any other unbelievers: when the Arab polytheists, for example, acknowledged that Allah created the heavens and the earth, we did not accuse them of falsehood in that specific claim, although they were still disbelievers. Likewise, if an unbeliever says, “Allah is ever-living, all-powerful, and the Creator,” we do not deny the truth of that statement.

Therefore, whoever lies about Allah in a single word, claiming that Allah has revealed it to him when Allah has revealed nothing of the sort, is one of the liars whose sayings—when they claim to be conveying them from Allah, the Blessed and Exalted—can never be accepted as evidence. As for anything else they say, they stand no differently from ordinary people—or rather, from other habitual liars. If the correctness of a given statement is established by evidence independent of them, it is accepted because that evidence proves it true, not because they said it. But if no such independent proof exists, then, once their lie against Allah has been established, their word carries no authority whatsoever.

Consequently, should these people acknowledge the messengership of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) and affirm that he is truthful in all that he conveyed from Allah of the Book and the wisdom, they are obliged to believe in everything authentically reported from him of the Book and the wisdom, just as belief is obligatory in everything brought by the other messengers. Yet if they deny him in a single word, or even entertain doubt about his truthfulness in that word, it becomes impossible—