(may Allah bless him and grant him peace):

“Allah has cursed whoever drinks wine, mistreats his parents, or changes land boundary markers”;

or, “Allah has cursed the thief”;

or, “Allah has cursed the one who consumes usury, the one who pays it, its two witnesses, and its scribe”;

or, “Allah has cursed whoever withholds obligatory charity or transgresses concerning it”;

or, “Whoever commits an offense in Medina or shelters an offender is subject to the curse of Allah, the angels, and all people”;

or, “Whoever drags his lower garment out of arrogance, Allah will not look at him on the Day of Resurrection”;

or, “No one with an atom’s weight of arrogance in his heart will enter Paradise”;

and, “Whoever cheats us is not one of us”;

or, “Whoever is ascribed to someone other than his father or takes patrons other than his own, Paradise is forbidden to him”;

or, “Whoever swears a false oath to seize a Muslim’s property will meet Allah while He is angry with him”;

or, “Whoever lays claim to a Muslim’s property through a false oath, Allah has made the Fire his due and forbidden Paradise to him”;

or, “No one who severs ties of kinship will enter Paradise”;

and other hadiths containing threats of punishment—we may not single out someone who has committed any of these deeds and say, “This particular person has incurred this threatened punishment.” Repentance and other factors that avert punishment remain possible. Nor may we say, “This entails cursing Muslims, cursing the community of Muhammad (may Allah bless him and grant him peace), or cursing people of consummate truthfulness or the righteous.”

The answer is that whenever a person of consummate truthfulness or a righteous person commits any of these deeds, there must be an impediment preventing the threatened punishment from reaching him, even though its cause is present. Thus, someone who does these things believing them permissible on the basis of independent scholarly judgment, following another’s scholarly opinion, or the like, would at most fall into a category of people of consummate truthfulness whom the threatened punishment does not reach because of an impediment—just as it does not reach a person because of repentance