require every believer to hold that belief—just as many questions in medicine (1), astronomy, and the like are not binding articles of faith.

From this arise three weighty premises:

First: Not everything a person believes to be an incontrovertible truth, established by reason or by revelation, is necessarily so.

Second: Not everything one individual knows with absolute certainty becomes obligatory for all people to believe.

Third (2): Not everything that can be known with certainty after the briefest reflection must therefore be believed.

Given this, the utmost that the advocates of these doctrines can say is that their claims are rationally conclusive truths, evident upon the slightest consideration. Even so, it is not incumbent upon those morally responsible to believe them until their obligatoriness is demonstrated by the legal proofs through which obligation itself is recognized. Hence, such a person has no right to compel others to adopt that belief or to punish those who refuse, unless he first shows that the Lawgiver has indeed enjoined it upon everyone in precisely this manner—something they have never established, nor is there any way to do so. How much more so when the very opposite is true in the eyes of those who reveal their error: that what they assert contradicts clear reason and sound transmission, its falsehood being self-evident to the intellect, and that their view is opposed to the Quran, the Sunnah (3), and the consensus of the early generations of the ummah—while the Lawgiver has in fact affirmed its negation and commanded belief in the contrary.

Ninth aspect: There is no doubt that whoever meets Allah believing, in general terms, in everything the Messenger brought, affirming whatever details of that whole have reached him and denying none of them, is thereby one of the believers. For it is beyond human capacity to believe in every individual detail of all that the Messenger has reported and commanded; there is no one except that some matter has escaped his knowledge