In other words, once a person has understood the meaning of this blessed phrase, it becomes a safeguard for him against eternal residence in the Fire—a point the Prophet ﷺ repeated so that it would be firmly fixed in people’s minds. Such a person may not have fulfilled all that the phrase demands in terms of perfect righteous action and complete avoidance of sin, yet he has been spared from major shirk and has met—both inwardly and outwardly—the minimum requirements of faith, according to the judgment of some scholars; the fine points of this matter are not the subject of the present discussion (1). He therefore remains under the Divine Will: he might enter the Fire as recompense for the sins he committed or the obligations he neglected, but eventually this blessed statement will rescue him, or Allah may pardon him outright out of His grace and generosity. This is the purport of the Prophet’s earlier words: “Whoever says, ‘There is no god but Allah,’ it will benefit him on some day of his life.”

By contrast, whoever utters the phrase with his tongue without understanding its meaning—or understands it but does not believe in it—will find that saying “There is no god but Allah” brings him no benefit in the Hereafter. Its utility would be restricted to this worldly life, and that only if he is living under the protection of an Islamic polity.