from Abū Yūsuf, from Abū Hanīfa, that no one is excused for ignorance of his Creator, given what he sees of the creation of the heavens and the earth, his own creation, and all the rest of his Lord’s creation.
They said:
It is also reported that he said: Even if Allah had not sent a messenger, people would have been obliged to know Him through their reason.
They said:
This is the position of our scholars among Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah. Indeed, Abū Mansūr al-Māturīdī said concerning a child capable of reasoning that he is obliged to know Allah, even if he has not reached puberty.
They said:
This is the position of many scholars of Iraq. Some of them, however, said that nothing is obligatory upon a child before puberty, just as bodily acts of worship are unanimously agreed not to be obligatory upon him.”
I say:
This second position is that of most scholars, although many groups among the followers of Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and Ahmad hold that reason discerns good and evil, as do these Hanafīs. The disagreement among these groups over prohibition and permissibility—whether things are prohibited or permissible before the coming of revelation—is only tenable for those who hold that prohibition or permissibility can be known through reason.
As for someone who says that reason cannot establish this, but then holds that these things were prohibited or permissible before revelation came, he has contradicted himself. Some who recognized their contradiction attempted to reconcile their two positions, but could not. For example, one group said that, after revelation came, we learned through it that things had previously been prohibited or permissible. There are other similarly weak statements, but this is not the place to discuss them at length.
The point here, however, is that most scholars hold that no religious responsibility applies before puberty, because the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said:
“The pen has been lifted from the child until he has a wet dream, and from the insane person until he regains his sanity.”
This hadith is well known in the Sunan collections and elsewhere, and has been accepted by the jurists, as related in