They say: The weighing of deeds also proves this. Were reward and punishment not connected to deeds and entailed by them, with deeds serving as their price, the weighing would have no meaning. Allah Most High says:

7: 8, 9 “The weighing on that Day will be just. Those whose scales are heavy—it is they who will be successful. And those whose scales are light—they are the ones who will have lost their souls because they were unjust toward Our signs.”

These two groups stand in the starkest opposition, with the greatest gulf between them. The Jabriyyah deny any connection whatsoever between deeds and recompense. They hold it possible for Allah to punish someone who has spent his entire life obeying Him and to grant bliss to someone who has spent his entire life disobeying Him, regarding both outcomes as equal in relation to Him. They also hold it possible for someone with few deeds to be raised to higher and better ranks than someone whose deeds are greater and more numerous. In their view, everything depends on sheer will, without any underlying reason, cause, or wisdom accounting for the reward of one person and the punishment of another.

The Qadariyyah, meanwhile, hold that He is obliged to do what is best. They make recompense depend entirely on deeds, as payment for them, and maintain that receiving reward without having worked for it diminishes a servant’s enjoyment, because he must bear the burden of being beholden for charity received without payment.

May Allah destroy them! How ignorant they are of Allah, and how deluded concerning Him! They make His bounty and kindness to the servant count against the servant. They have even said that receiving what He gives as wages for one’s deeds is more welcome and pleasing to the servant than receiving it as a gracious gift from Him without having worked for it.

The Jabriyyah take the most extreme opposing position, allowing deeds no influence whatsoever upon recompense.

Both groups have strayed and deviated from the straight path—the path for which Allah fashioned His servants’ innate disposition, which the messengers brought and the Scriptures revealed. That path affirms that deeds are causes leading to reward and punishment, entailing them just as other causes entail their effects. Righteous deeds themselves come through Allah’s enabling, bounty, and favor, and are His charitable gift to His servant: He helps him perform them, enables him to do them, creates in him the will and ability to perform them, makes them beloved to him, adorns them in his heart, and makes their opposites hateful to him. Even so, they are neither the price of His recompense and reward nor commensurate with it,