obligation Allah imposed upon His creation. He replied, ‘Knowledge. Allah, Mighty and Majestic, says:

“I did not create jinn and mankind except to worship Me.”
[Surah al-Dhāriyāt 56]

Ibn ʿAbbās said: “To know Me.”’”

I say: This statement is [correct], for the first obligation Allah imposed through His Messenger was to affirm the two testimonies of faith. As the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said to Muʿādh ibn Jabal when he sent him to Yemen:

“You are going to a people of the Scripture, so let the first thing you call them to be the testimony that none has the right to be worshipped except Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”

Both al-Bukhārī and Muslim recorded this in their Sahīh collections.

The authoritative shaykhs, such as Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir and others, likewise said this. Affirming the two testimonies of faith entails knowledge. However, a group of speculative theologians, along with those jurists and Sufis who followed them, held that knowledge becomes obligatory upon the servant first, before the two testimonies of faith become obligatory. Some of them said that the servant must