with reverent fear of Him, as the Most High said:

“This is what you were promised—for everyone who repeatedly turned to Allah and kept His commandments.”

“Who feared the Most Merciful unseen and came with a heart turned to Him.”

These deeds also include loving and hating for Allah’s sake, and showing loyalty and enmity for Allah’s sake.

Second: they assumed that whenever the Lawgiver declares someone a disbeliever who will remain in the Fire forever, this can only be because his heart contains no knowledge or assent whatsoever. In this they contradicted sensory experience, reason, revelation, and what people of sound natural disposition and the great majority of rational thinkers agree upon. A person may recognize that someone else has the truth, yet deny it out of envy, a desire to exalt himself above that person, or personal desire. That desire drives him to wrong the other person and reject what he says by every means, even though he knows in his heart that the other person has the truth.

Most of those who rejected the messengers knew that they had the truth and were truthful. Yet they rejected them either out of envy, a desire for supremacy and leadership, or attachment to their existing religion and the benefits it afforded them, such as wealth, leadership, friendship with certain people, and other things. They saw that following the messengers would mean abandoning desires dear to them or facing things they disliked. They therefore rejected the messengers and opposed them, becoming among the most extreme disbelievers, like Iblīs and Pharaoh, despite knowing that they themselves were following falsehood and that the messengers had the truth.

For this reason, the disbelievers offer no sound argument that undermines the messengers’ truthfulness. They rely only on the fact that the messengers’ message conflicts with their desires, as when they said to Noah:

“Should we believe you when the lowliest people follow you?”

It is well known that his being followed by the lowliest people does not undermine his truthfulness; rather, they disliked associating with those people