the path of Allah and fearing no reproach from any critic. Thus they strove for Allah with the truest striving, treading the way of al-Ṣiddīq (Abu Bakr, the ever-truthful) and his companions who fought the apostates after the death of the Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—until the Muslims stamped him with the seal of leadership and named him the second al-Ṣiddīq, for who could be more deserving of such vindication once the faint-hearted had faltered?

Those Jahmites, however, declared the believers to be disbelieving apostates, while treating what is in reality outright unbelief and rejection of the Messenger as faith and knowledge. They confused the Imams and the ummah, cloaking truth with falsehood, and their trial in the religion proved more ruinous than the trial of the renegade Khārijites. For although the Khārijites excommunicated the believers and deemed their blood and property lawful, their calamity did not consist in denying the speech of the Lord of all worlds, or His names, attributes, and the reality of His very Being; rather, their misguidance lay below that—in rebellion against the prescribed sunnah. Later writers on sects did report that the Khārijites’ stance on monotheism was identical to that of the Jahmites and the Muʿtazilites, which is an added reproach against the Jahmites. Yet it would appear—Allah knows best—that such words came from remnants of the Khārijites who were alive when Jahm’s doctrines first emerged at the beginning of the second century AH. Before that time no one in Islam had ever professed Jahm’s negation of the divine attributes, the claim that the Quran is created, the denial that Allah is above His Throne, and the like. Consequently this view cannot rightly be ascribed to any Muslim prior to the second century—neither to the Khārijites nor to anyone else. In that earlier period no one in the Muslim community voiced any of these Jahmite negations, and no report attributes such Jahmite doctrines to the well-known Khārijites of the time, or to any others. (1)

3 – The Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—then laid bare the confusion and misguidance of those who became entangled in the ordeal of claiming that the Quran is created. They professed to believe in what the messengers had brought while simultaneously denying its very substance, for in truth their doctrine negates the attributes of Allah Most High, including His being—glorified be He—a speaker whose speech subsists in His Essence. He said:

“When the Jahmites introduced the claim that the Quran is created, its real meaning is that Allah did not …”