such a person has never been called a believer. Yet according to the Jahmiyyah, if knowledge is present in his heart, he is a believer whose faith is complete, equal to the faith of the prophets, whatever he might say or do. In their view, he cannot conceivably lose faith unless that knowledge leaves his heart.

Moreover, most later scholars who defended Jahm’s position endorse qualifying one’s profession of faith with “if Allah wills.” They say that “faith in the religious sense” is what a servant meets his Lord with, even though its linguistic meaning is broader. Thus, on “the question of this qualification,” they took faith to mean what they claimed it meant in religious usage, departing from its linguistic meaning. Why, then, did they not do the same regarding deeds? The scriptural evidence that obligatory deeds are part of complete faith is too abundant to count. By contrast, there is no scriptural evidence that only the faith upon which a person dies may be called faith. This is an innovated view that none of the early predecessors expressed.

These people, however, supposed that this was the reasoning of those early predecessors who qualified their profession of faith. They and others like them were not well acquainted with the statements of the early predecessors. Rather, they defend the apparent meaning of those statements using what they have learned from the speculative theologians among the Jahmiyyah and other proponents of innovation. Thus, the outward formulation remains that of the early predecessors, while its underlying meaning is the doctrine of the Jahmiyyah, whose position on faith is the most corrupt of all. Allah willing, we shall mention the statements of the early predecessors concerning “qualifying one’s profession of faith.”

Accordingly, when the unsoundness of Jahm’s position on faith began to become apparent to some followers of Abū al-Hasan, many of them disagreed with him, and some followed the early predecessors. Abū al-Qāsim al-Ansārī, al-Shahrastānī’s teacher, said in his commentary on Abū al-Ma‘ālī’s al-Irshād, after mentioning the position of his fellow scholars: “The adherents of the transmitted tradition held that faith comprises all acts of obedience