Nor is it permissible for us to say, “This entails cursing the Muslims—cursing the community of Muhammad ﷺ, or cursing the veracious and the righteous.” For it is said: whenever a veracious or righteous person happens to commit one of these deeds, some impediment must exist that keeps the threat from attaching to him, even though its cause is present.

Accordingly, when someone performs these acts while believing—through personal reasoning, imitation, or the like—that they are lawful, the most that can be said is that he belongs to a class of the veracious for whom the threat is averted by a preventive factor, just as it is averted through repentance, deeds that erase sins, and the like.

Know that this is the path one is obliged to take; anything else leaves only two blameworthy alternatives:

1. To affirm that the threat applies to every individual person by name and to claim that this is acting on the basis of the texts. This view is uglier than that of the Kharijites who declare sinners to be unbelievers, and than the stance of the Muʿtazilah and others. Its falsity is necessarily known from the religion of Islam, and its proofs are set out elsewhere.

2. To abandon both affirming and acting upon the hadiths of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ out of the notion that doing so would necessarily impugn those who oppose them.