against him except with the same evidence used against anyone who denies the Islam of Abū Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthmān, Mu‘āwiya, and others. Although some were superior to others, their differences in merit do not change the fact that the Islam of all of them was publicly evident.
As for the claim that “Mu‘āwiya’s faith was hypocrisy,” this too is a fabricated lie. No Muslim scholar accused Mu‘āwiya of hypocrisy; rather, the scholars agree on the soundness of his Islam. Some of them withheld judgment concerning the soundness of his father Abū Sufyān’s Islam. As for Mu‘āwiya and his brother Yazīd, however, they did not dispute the soundness of their Islam, just as they did not dispute that of ‘Ikrima ibn Abī Jahl, Suhayl ibn ‘Amr, Safwān ibn Umayya, and others who embraced Islam at the conquest of Mecca.
How could a man govern the Muslims for forty years, first as a deputy and then as a ruler in his own right—leading them in the five daily prayers, delivering sermons and exhorting them, enjoining good and forbidding evil, enforcing the prescribed punishments among them, distributing among them their revenues acquired without fighting, their war booty, and their alms, and leading them on pilgrimage—yet conceal his hypocrisy from them all? Among them were many eminent Companions.
More telling still is that—praise be to Allah—not one of the Umayyad or Abbasid caliphs who exercised general authority was accused of heresy and hypocrisy. None of the Umayyads was accused of heresy and hypocrisy. Although one of them might be accused of some form of religious innovation or injustice, none of them was accused by the scholars of heresy and hypocrisy.