Allah sent Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, while that prophet was still alive, he would surely believe in him and support him. He also commanded him to take a covenant from his community: if Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, were sent while they were still alive, they would surely believe in him and support him.”
Allah Most High has thus obliged the believers to believe in the Messenger and wage jihad alongside him. Believing in him includes affirming the truth of everything he conveyed; waging jihad alongside him includes repelling everyone who opposes what he brought and deviates concerning Allah’s names and signs.
These speculative theologians who oppose the Quran and Sunnah, whom the early generations and the imams condemned, have fulfilled neither faith nor jihad to their fullest extent. Rather, they began debating groups of unbelievers and adherents of religious innovations who were even further from the Sunnah than themselves, using an approach that could only be carried through by rejecting some of what the Messenger brought. Yet this approach does not decisively refute those unbelievers through reason. Thus, they neither truly believed in what the Messenger brought nor properly waged jihad against the unbelievers. They began saying that believing in the Messenger, waging jihad against the unbelievers, and refuting the people of heresy and religious innovation were impossible except through the rational arguments they themselves had adopted. Any revealed texts that contradicted these rational arguments, they maintained, had to be rejected—whether by denying their truth, reinterpreting them, or consigning knowledge of their meaning to Allah—because these rational arguments were the foundation of the revealed texts.
Yet when their position is subjected to thorough scrutiny, the reverse proves true: faith in the Messenger and jihad against his enemies cannot be fully realized except through sound, unequivocal reason, which contradicts their purported rational arguments, and it becomes clear