Nor is there any difference between a person’s believing that Allah has forbidden this act and has threatened its doer with an unspecified punishment, and his believing that Allah has forbidden it or has threatened it with a particular punishment. In both cases he is conveying information about Allah; therefore, just as it is permissible to report the first on the basis of non-definitive evidence, it is equally permissible to report the second. Indeed, were someone to say that acting upon such reports in matters of threat is even more emphatically required, he would be correct. For this reason, the scholars were lenient regarding the chains of transmission for hadiths of encouragement and warning in a way they were not for hadiths that establish legal rulings, because belief in the threat itself impels people to abstain.

If that threat proves to be true, the person has attained safety; and if it is not true—so that the actual punishment for the deed is lighter than the stated threat—his mistake in believing the punishment to be greater does not harm him, provided he refrained from the act. Should he believe the punishment to be less, he may likewise be mistaken, and if he withholds judgment altogether, neither affirming nor denying the additional punishment, he could still be in error.

Such an error may make the deed seem insignificant to him, so that he commits it and thereby deserves the greater punishment if it is in fact established, or at least brings upon himself the cause that warrants it.

Accordingly, error in belief is the same under both suppositions—whether one affirms the threat or denies it—and deliverance from punishment