desires, his objectives can only be realized by fending off whatever contradicts them of the truth. When a specious doubt arises, the doubt and the desire coincide, passion surges, the correct view is concealed, and the very face of the truth is effaced. Even when the truth is unmistakably clear, leaving no room for obscurity or doubt, he still goes ahead and opposes it, saying, “I can always repent afterward.”

Concerning such people and those like them, the Exalted said: “Then there came after them successors who neglected the prayer and followed their desires” (Maryam 59).

And He said: “Then there came after them successors who inherited the Scripture; they take the fleeting gain of this lower world and say, ‘We shall be forgiven,’ yet if a similar gain comes to them they seize it again. Was it not covenanted with them in the Scripture that they should not say of Allah anything but the truth, and they studied what it contained? The Abode of the Hereafter is better for those who are mindful of Allah—will you not, then, understand?” (Al-Aʿraf 169).

The Almighty informed us that they snatched at the paltry profit of this life even though they knew it was forbidden to them, and they said, “We shall be forgiven.” Whenever another similar profit presented itself, they took it again; thus they persist. This very persistence drives them to speak untruth about Allah. They claim, “This is His ruling, His law, His religion,” while knowing full well that His religion, His law, and His ruling are the opposite—or else they do not even know whether it is truly His religion, His law, or His ruling. Sometimes they speak about Allah without knowledge; at other times they knowingly assert what they know to be false.

Those who fear Allah, however, know that the Hereafter is better than this world, so their love of status and appetite do not induce them to prefer the temporal over the eternal. The means to that is to hold fast to the Book and the Sunnah, seek help through patience and prayer, and reflect on the perishability and baseness of this world in contrast to the nearness, permanence, and excellence of the Hereafter.

Such people inevitably introduce innovations into the religion alongside flagrant wrongdoing in practice, so the two evils converge; for following caprice blinds the eye of the heart, preventing it from distinguishing between the Sunnah