—knowledge is not to be taken from him, he is not to be appointed as a judge, his testimony is not to be accepted, and so forth. Mālik’s position is close to this. This is why the compilers of the Sahīh collections did not include narrations from those who actively propagated their beliefs. Nevertheless, they and the other scholars narrated from many who privately held the views of the Qadariyyah, Murji’ah, Khawārij, and Shī‘ah.
Ahmad said:
“If we were to abandon narrating from the Qadariyyah, we would abandon most of the people of Basra.”
This is because “the question of the creation of human actions and the divine willing of all that occurs” is a difficult one. Just as the Qadariyyah, both among the Mu‘tazilah and others, erred concerning it, so too did many—or most—of those who refuted them. In refuting them, they followed the approach of Jahm ibn Safwān and his followers: they denied Allah’s wisdom in His creation and His commands, denied His mercy towards His servants, and denied the causes He had established in creation and in His commands. They rejected realities present in His creatures and His revealed laws, to such an extent that most rational people who understood their doctrine became averse to what they supposed to be the Sunnah. For they claimed that the position of Ahl al-Sunnah on divine decree was the doctrine innovated by Jahm. A fuller discussion of this belongs elsewhere.
The point here is simply that, when refuting the Murji’ah, Jahmiyyah, Qadariyyah, and others, the “early scholars” refuted the statements reported to them from these groups and those they had heard from some of their members. Such a statement might represent the position of only one faction among them, or it might have been altered in transmission. Thus, they refuted those Murji’ah who regarded religion and faith as one and the same, and said that it consists in verbal profession.
Moreover, in their time there had not yet appeared among the Murji’ah anyone who said:
“Faith is mere verbal profession, without assent or knowledge