The same applies to “the question of refraining,” as we stated at the outset, explaining that only the people of innovation and others like them who are ignorant and unjust disagree with this.

“The second case” is when good deeds can be performed without committing a sin, but only with hardship that a person cannot bring himself to endure, or with an aversion arising from his disposition. He cannot bring himself to perform those great good deeds, commanded as obligatory or recommended, unless he allows himself some prohibited things that he desires, whose sinfulness is outweighed by the benefit of the good deed. This situation occurs frequently among those engaged in authority, governance, and jihad; scholarship, adjudication, and theological disputation; worship and Sufism; and among ordinary people.

An example is someone who cannot bring himself to discharge the duties of governance—enjoining right, forbidding wrong, enforcing the prescribed punishments, securing the roads, fighting the enemy, and distributing funds—unless he enjoys certain prohibited advantages, such as appropriating some funds for himself, exercising dominion over people, showing favoritism in distribution, and satisfying other desires.

Likewise, in jihad, a person may be unable to bring himself to fight without a measure of recklessness. In scholarship, he may be unable to bring himself to master jurisprudence and the foundations of religion without engaging in some prohibited forms of speculative opinion and theological disputation. Nor can he bring himself to master the knowledge of prescribed worship and acquire the knowledge he is commanded to seek except through a measure of monasticism.

This situation has become widespread under the rule of kings, occurring among the kings themselves and many of their commanders, judges, scholars, and worshippers—by whom I mean the people of their time. And because of this