so Allah will suffice you against them. And He is the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing.” In another verse, He says:

“Whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted from him, and in the Hereafter he will be among the losers.”

This entails that the deeds of anyone who follows a religion other than Islam are rejected and that he will be a loser in the Hereafter. It therefore establishes that the religion of Islam is obligatory and that every other religion is invalid. It does not establish that what is denoted by “religion” is identical to what is denoted by “faith.” Rather, He commanded us to say, “We believe in Allah,” and we were commanded to say, “And to Him we submit.” We were thus commanded to do two things; how, then, can we make them one?

If they make Islam and faith one and the same thing, they must either say that the terms are synonymous—in which case this is mere repetition, with one term denoting exactly what the other denotes—or say that each term denotes a different attribute, as with the names of Allah and the names of His Book. But this does not entail commanding both together; rather, it entails referring to the same thing sometimes by one description and sometimes by the other. No one would say, “Allah has made obligatory upon you the five daily prayers and the prescribed prayer,” when these are one and the same.

Descriptions are joined by conjunctions when the intention is to explain the attributes, because of the praise or blame they convey, as in His words:

“Glorify the name of your Lord, the Most High, who created and proportioned, and who ordained and guided.”

One does not say, “Pray to your Lord, the Most High, and to your Lord who created and proportioned.”

Muhammad ibn Nasr al-Marwazī—may Allah have mercy on him—said: “Allah has thus made clear in His Book and the Sunnah of His Messenger that Islam and faith are inseparable. Whoever believes in Allah has faith in Him, and whoever has faith in Allah has humbled himself before Him and submitted to Him. Whoever fasts, prays, fulfils the obligations Allah has imposed, and abstains from what