This dispute is resolved by distinguishing the different kinds of capacity for the act, as explained above. The act is beyond the capacity that accompanies its performance, although it is within the capacity that makes its performance possible—the basis on which commands and prohibitions apply.

As for the second type, they agree that someone incapable of an act cannot perform it, as in the inability of the blind, amputees, and those incapacitated by infirmity to add dots to a Quran manuscript, write it out, or fly. They agree that commands of this kind do not occur in the Sharia. Only a group of extremists inclined towards compulsion disputed this: followers of al-Ash‘arī and those jurists who agreed with them among the followers of Mālik, al-Shāfi‘ī, Ahmad, and others. Their dispute concerned only whether reason allows such an act to be commanded. Some even debated whether something intrinsically impossible—such as combining two contraries or two contradictories—could rationally be commanded, although no such command occurs in the Sharia.

Anyone who goes to extremes and claims that commands of this kind actually occur in the Sharia—as does someone who claims that Abū Lahab was required to believe that he would not believe—is wrong in this according to the general body of Muslims across all groups. No one has said that Abū Lahab was made to hear this declaration stating that he would not believe, and that he was nevertheless commanded to believe.

Likewise, concerning Noah’s people: when Noah, peace be upon him, was informed that none of his people would believe except those who had already believed, he did not thereafter use this declaration to command them to believe. Rather, if it is assumed that he was told he would burn in the Fire