purely for Your Face, and allow no one to have any share in it.’

Al-Fuḍayl ibn ʿIyāḍ, commenting on the Almighty’s words,

“that He may test you to see which of you is best in deed”
(Sūrat al-Mulk 2),
said, ‘The best deed is the most sincere and the most correct.’ They asked him, ‘Abū ʿAlī, what is meant by “the most sincere and the most correct”?’ He replied, ‘If a deed is sincere but not correct, it will not be accepted; and if it is correct but not sincere, it will not be accepted—until it is both sincere and correct. Sincerity means that it is done for Allah alone, and correctness means that it conforms to the Sunnah.’

The first person in Islam to deny the reality of Allah’s love for His servant and the servant’s love for his Lord was al-Jaʿd ibn Dirham. Khālid ibn ʿAbdillāh al-Qasrī sacrificed him at Wāsiṭ, proclaiming, ‘People, offer your sacrifices—may Allah accept your offerings—for I am sacrificing al-Jaʿd ibn Dirham. He claims that Allah did not take Abraham as an intimate friend and did not speak to Moses directly. Exalted is Allah, far above what al-Jaʿd says!’ He then descended and slaughtered him.

Al-Jaʿd was the first to spread the doctrine of taʿṭīl, denying Allah’s attributes, His love, and His speech—just as the philosophers, the Jahmīs, the Bāṭinīs, and their likes among the Muʿaṭṭilah, Jahmīs, Muʿtazilites, and those who follow them do. They deny that Allah truly loves or is loved, they deny the bliss of beholding Him, and they deny that He, glorified be He, can be described with joy and similar qualities, claiming that such attributes belong to the realm of pleasure and delight, whereas in their view Allah cannot be described with any of that.

As for those philosophers, they concede that He may be described with such attributes, yet they fall into contradiction by asserting that the pleasurable, the one who experiences pleasure, and the pleasure itself are one and the same entity, thereby reducing the attribute itself to