religious innovation, as well as some proponents of unsound jurisprudence and some practitioners of misguided devotion. The imams condemned this. Even Imam Ahmad, renowned for his scrupulousness, would condemn such a claim.

A devout worshipper came and mentioned something of this kind to him. He said:

“Look at this vile fellow, declaring the Muslims’ wealth unlawful!”

He also said:

“I have heard that some of these people say, ‘A thief should not have his hand cut off, because the property is not legally protected.’”

Some of those claiming affiliation with religious scholarship in our own time have made similar statements, based on this specious argument: that unlawful wealth has come to predominate because of widespread usurpation and invalid contracts, and that lawful wealth has not been distinguished from unlawful wealth. This misconception also affected a group of jurists who authored books, so they ruled that a person may take no more than necessity requires. Another group, seeing the hardship this entailed, closed the door to scrupulousness altogether.

They thus fell into two groups: the permissivists make no distinction between the lawful and the unlawful. Rather, the lawful is whatever falls into their hands, and the unlawful is whatever they themselves forbid. They adopted this same false assumption—that unlawful wealth had spread throughout the earth—and recognized that people cannot do without food and clothing. They therefore began obtaining these by whatever means they could.

Let the sensible person consider the consequences of that misguided scrupulousness: how it led to casting off the restraints of the religion of Islam.