true believers, nor do they genuinely attest to him. Among them were the Jews who lived near him and said, “We bear witness that you are the Messenger of Allah.” It is answered (1):
Response Twenty-Two:
The truth conveyed by the messengers shows that faith of the heart is not mere cognitive awareness of that truth. If a person were to know in his heart that it is true, yet hate it, hate the Messenger who brought it, hate the One who sent him, oppose it, act arrogantly toward them, and refuse to submit to that truth, such a person would not be a believer rewarded in the Hereafter—this by the unanimous agreement of the Muslims, even though they dispute at length over the precise definition of imān. Thus they never differed regarding the disbelief of Iblis, despite his knowledge and understanding. Faith must therefore consist of knowledge in the heart and action in the heart as well. For this reason most of the leading scholars of the Murjiʾah—who define faith as nothing more than what is in the heart, or what is in the heart together with the tongue’s utterance—still include within it the heart’s love and humble submission to the truth; they do not reduce it to bare intellectual awareness. The term tasdīq (affirmation) embraces both the knowledge that resides in the heart and the action of the heart that knowledge necessarily calls forth, for one may say: “He has affirmed.”