and helplessness; each of these individuals may enjoy a particular spiritual state and a measure of strength, yet nothing of it will endure for him except what was attained in conformity with the command and in adherence to the Sunnah.

The worst category of all is the one who neither worships Allah nor seeks His help; such a person does not acknowledge that his knowledge is for Allah, nor that it is by Allah.

Accordingly, the Muʿtazilah and those Qadariyyah who deny the Divine Decree, while mistaken, are—by virtue of the importance they attach to commands and prohibitions and to divine promise and threat—better than the Jabariyyah Qadariyyah who turn away from the revealed law and its injunctions and prohibitions. The Sufis, for their part, are sounder than the Muʿtazilah in matters of predestination and in witnessing the oneness of Lordship; yet among them are those who harbor certain innovations, neglect segments of the divine command and prohibition, and set aside the realities of reward and punishment until they make the ultimate goal the contemplation of Lordship’s oneness and annihilation therein. In doing so they, too, become withdrawn from the community of Muslims and from the Sunnah—Muʿtazilah in this respect—and the innovation they fall into may even be worse than that of the original Muʿtazilah. Both groups, moreover, trace their origins back to Basra.