and the rest of the Murji’ah: that when a composite thing loses some of its parts, it must cease to exist altogether. Yet he mentioned only the apparent form of their specious argument. What they have stated is easily answered: one may concede to him that the composite whole no longer remains intact as it was, but the loss of some of its parts does not entail the loss of all the remaining parts.

Al-Shāfiʿī, together with the Companions, the Successors, and the rest of the early generations, maintains that sin detracts from the completeness of faith. This is why the Lawgiver denied faith to such people. Thus, the whole that constitutes faith no longer remains intact in the presence of sins. Nevertheless, they maintain that some of it remains—whether its foundation, most of it, or some other portion. The point, then, is that some of it disappears while some remains.

For this reason, the Murji’ah were far more averse to the term “decrease” than to the term “increase.” For, in their view, if faith decreases, it must disappear altogether—if it is divisible and consists of multiple parts, as held by those who maintain this, namely the Khawārij and the Muʿtazilah. As for the Jahmiyyah, they regard it as a single entity admitting no multiplicity. They thus affirm a single entity that has no reality, just as they made similar claims concerning the oneness of the Lord and, among those of them who affirm His attributes, the oneness of His attributes.

What is remarkable is that the premise that led them into this was their belief that some faith and some disbelief—or something constituting faith and something constituting disbelief—cannot coexist in a person. They believed that Muslims agreed on this, as Abū al-Hasan and others mentioned. Because they believed in this consensus, they fell into a position that contradicts the actual consensus—the consensus of