to obey Allah, let him obey Him; and whoever vows to disobey Allah, let him not disobey Him.”

Thus, a prohibited contract may give rise to an obligation or a prohibition. It cannot, however, give rise to permissibility. When sales involving excessive uncertainty, usurious contracts, marriages to those within prohibited degrees of kinship, and similar transactions were forbidden, a person did not render what was prohibited lawful merely by committing the forbidden act, for such an act is disobedience. As a rule, acts of disobedience do not occasion Allah’s grace and mercy, while permissibility is part of Allah’s grace and mercy. Such acts may indeed result in one’s being granted respite and the gates of worldly prosperity being opened, but that is a matter of divine decree, not religious law. Rather, a prohibited contract may give rise to Allah’s punishment and to an obligation; prohibition itself may be a punishment, as Allah Most High says: “Because of wrongdoing on the part of the Jews, We forbade them good things that had previously been lawful to them” [al-Nisā’: 160] [al-Nisā’: 160]. Yet prohibition may also be an act of mercy, as is the case with our upright revealed law.

Those who disagree with this principle, such as the Zahirites and others like them, may deem every contract for which no specific permission has been granted to be prohibited, and deem the existence of every prohibited contract equivalent to its nonexistence. Both premises are inadmissible, as explained above.

This argument may also be answered in a second way, if the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—meant that conditions which [Allah] had not permitted were invalid even though He had not prohibited them. We say:

We have already cited the evidence in the Book, the Sunnah, and the transmitted reports demonstrating that covenants and conditions must be fulfilled in general, and that what is intended is the obligation to fulfill them. On this assumption, the obligation to fulfill them requires that they be