the people of Hellfire, and thus he enters it. (1)
They also report from some of the early generations: “Among the greatest of the major sins are to feel secure against Allah’s plan and to despair of His mercy.” (2)
Imam Aḥmad related—from ʿAwn ibn ʿAbd Allah or someone else—that he heard a man supplicating, “O Allah, do not make me secure from Your plan!” He disapproved of this and said, “Say instead: O Allah, do not make me among those who feel secure from Your plan.”
They erect all of this upon their false foundation: denying wisdom, rationale, and causes. In their view Allah acts neither for a wisdom nor for a reason; He acts solely by a will stripped of wisdom and rationale. Hence He acts neither for something nor by something, and it is, according to them, entirely possible for Him to punish the people of obedience with the severest torment while lavishing rich reward upon His enemies and the people of disobedience—the two cases being, for Him, exactly the same. One only knows that He will not do so, they say, because the Truthful One has informed us that He will not; only then is its impossibility established, not because the act itself would be false or unjust. As they see it, injustice is intrinsically impossible; it cannot occur, just as it is impossible for a single body to be in two places at one moment, for night and day to coexist in the same hour, or for a thing to be both existent and nonexistent at the same instant. That, for them, is the very definition of injustice.
When such a servant turns inward, he says: “One whose affair never settles and whose plan can never be trusted—how can anyone rely on approaching Him? How can obedience to Him and adherence to His commands be taken as sound? We have only this brief span of life; if in it we give up pleasures, renounce desires, and shoulder the burdens of worship, yet still possess no assurance that He might overturn our faith into unbelief, our monotheism into polytheism, our obedience into sin, our righteousness into licentiousness, and then perpetuate punishment upon us, we will indeed be losers in this world and the next!”