disagrees with it is either an innovator or an unbeliever whose blood may lawfully be shed and whose property may be seized. All this departs from the Lawgiver’s intent, and its cause is their failure to understand the purpose of the revealed Law.

The best-known of these groups in our time are four: the group called the Ash‘arīs, whom most people today regard as the people of the Sunnah; the group called the Mu‘tazilah; the group called the Bātiniyyah; and the group called the Hashwiyyah. All these groups have adopted differing beliefs concerning Allah and have diverted many expressions of revelation from their apparent meanings to interpretations that they have made to fit those beliefs. They have claimed that these constitute the original revealed Law to which all people were intended to adhere, and that whoever deviates from them is either an unbeliever or an innovator. Yet when all these views are examined, together with the Lawgiver’s intent, it becomes clear that most of them are newly introduced assertions