justified is it to fight these people who have forsaken the laws of Islam and wage war against Allah and His Messenger, whose aggression and rebellion are the least of their evils?

Fighting aggressive assailants is established by the Sunnah and scholarly consensus. These people are aggressors attacking the Muslims’ lives, property, families, and religion. Each of these provides grounds for fighting an assailant who attacks it, and whoever is killed defending it is a martyr. What, then, of someone who fights to defend them all? These people are among the worst of the unjust rebels who invoke a religious interpretation. Yet anyone who claims that they should be fought in the same manner as rebels acting on a religious interpretation has committed a grievous error and strayed far astray. For the minimum requirement in the latter case is that they have a defensible interpretation on whose basis they have rebelled.

For this reason, the scholars said that the ruler should correspond with them: if they raise a doubt, he should clarify it; and if they mention a grievance, he should redress it. What doubt can these people raise, when they wage war against Allah and His Messenger, spread corruption throughout the land, and forsake the laws of the religion?

Undoubtedly, they do not claim to uphold the religion of Islam more faithfully, in knowledge and practice, than this group. Rather, despite professing Islam, they know that this group is more knowledgeable about Islam and follows it more faithfully than they do. Everyone beneath the sky, Muslim and disbeliever alike, knows this. Nevertheless, they threaten the Muslims with war. They therefore cannot have any clear misconception on whose basis they deem fighting the Muslims lawful. How could they, when they have reviled the womenfolk of most of the subjects who never fought them? Indeed, people have seen them venerating a place while seizing the wealth it contains, and venerating a man