they understood it to mean: that he had said, “Contentment means that you neither ask Allah for Paradise nor seek His protection from the Fire.”

Abū Sulaymān’s actual statement does not indicate that he was content with that, but rather that he was resolved to be content with it. We know that such resolve would not endure, but would collapse; that it would have been better to leave such words unsaid; and that they call for correction, just as the claims of Sumnūn and Ruwaym and other such claims did. Nevertheless, there is a vast difference between his statement and the one attributed to him. The latter implies that anyone who asks Allah for Paradise and seeks His protection from the Fire is not content. There is a difference between saying, “If such-and-such were done to me, I would be content,” and saying, “Only someone who neither seeks good nor flees evil can be content.”

From this and other considerations, it is clear that Shaykh Abū Sulaymān was too eminent to