it?”

He replied, “Did I tell you that you would enter it this year?”

“No,” he said.

He replied, “You will indeed come to it and circumambulate it.”

The response is:

None of the Companions claimed that his reason took precedence over the Messenger’s explicit words. Rather, one of them would find a statement of his difficult to understand and ask about what would resolve his doubt. It would then become clear to him that the text contained no such difficulty.

When the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, stated that those who are saved would not undergo a detailed reckoning, he did not exclude everything called a reckoning. Reckoning may mean weighing good deeds against evil deeds, which entails detailed questioning; it may also mean presenting people’s deeds to them and making them aware of them.

Thus, when the people of the Sunnah differed over whether the unbelievers would be brought to account, the decisive resolution was to affirm reckoning in the sense of counting and enumerating their deeds and presenting them to them—not in the sense of affirming that they have good deeds that would benefit them by earning reward on the Day of Resurrection and would be weighed against their evil deeds.

Likewise, when the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said:

“No one who pledged allegiance beneath the tree will enter the Fire,”

he was not referring to crossing the Bridge, for that is not called entering it. Rather, Allah called it coming to it, saying:

“There is none of you who will not come to it.”