upon them, and they will never emerge from the Fire.

Such people resemble the Christians about whom Allah says:

“They took their rabbis and monks as lords besides Allah, and also the Messiah, son of Mary, while they had been commanded to worship only one God. There is no deity but Him. Transcendent is He above whatever they associate with Him.”

In the Musnad, and classed as sound by al-Tirmidhī, ʿAdiyy ibn Ḥātim relates that when he asked the Prophet ﷺ about this verse, saying, “They did not worship them,” the Prophet replied, “Indeed they made lawful for them what Allah had forbidden and forbade them what Allah had made lawful, and they obeyed them; that was their worship of them.”

Hence it is said of such people: they were denied arrival because they neglected the fundamentals. The root of all roots is to realize faith in what the Messenger ﷺ has brought. One must therefore believe that Muhammad ﷺ is the Messenger of Allah to all creation—humankind and jinn, Arabs and non-Arabs, their scholars and their worshippers alike.