keep us steadfast in it until death, whereas no one desires unbelief.”

But the following objection may be raised: if saying “He is a believer” means the same as saying “He is in Paradise,” you nevertheless say of an unbeliever, “He is an unbeliever,” without saying “He is in the Fire” unless you make this conditional upon his dying in unbelief. This shows that he is certainly an unbeliever at present, even though he may become a believer. The same applies to a believer, whether one is speaking of oneself or of someone else.

Thus, if it were said of a Jew or a Christian, “This man is an unbeliever,” someone holding this view would add, “If Allah wills,” unless he knew that the man would die an unbeliever. According to these people, no one knows anyone to be a believer unless he knows that he will die upon faith. This view was held by many scholastic theologians who followed Ibn Kullāb, and many followers of the imams agreed with them. Yet it was not the view of any of the early generations—neither the four imams nor anyone else. Nor did any of those early scholars who qualified their profession of faith with “if Allah wills” base their practice on this reasoning: neither Ahmad nor anyone before him.

A group who had originally qualified their profession of faith in imitation of the early generations carried the reasoning behind this view further. They had inherited this qualification from the early generations. The people of Syria were stern in their opposition to the Murji’ah. Muhammad ibn Yūsuf al-Firyābī, a companion of al-Thawrī, served as a frontier guard at Ascalon when it was still inhabited and was among the finest Muslim frontier strongholds. Its merits thus derived from the virtue of guarding the frontier in Allah’s cause.

They qualified their profession of faith with “if Allah wills” in imitation of the early generations. They also used this qualification when speaking of righteous deeds, as when a man says, “I have prayed, if Allah wills,” and similar statements, intending thereby the acceptance of the deed, in keeping with reports transmitted from the early generations on this matter. Later, however, many of these people began qualifying everything in this way, saying, “This is my garment, if Allah wills,” and “This is a rope