and likewise His words:

“You will surely enter the Sacred Mosque, if Allah wills, in safety”

indicate that He wills this at a later time. Likewise, His words:

“His command, when He wills something, is only to say to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.”

Here, idhā (“when”) is an adverb referring to future time. This indicates that when He wills something to exist, He says to it, “Be,” and it is. Likewise, His words:

“And say, ‘Work, for Allah will see your deeds’”

make clear that He will see those deeds in the future, when they perform them.

The second basis for qualifying one’s profession of faith is that faith in its full sense entails doing everything Allah has commanded His servant to do and abstaining from everything He has forbidden. If a man says, “I am a believer,” in this sense, he has testified that he is among the righteous and God-fearing who fulfil everything they have been commanded to do and abstain from everything they have been forbidden, and thus that he is one of Allah’s allies. This amounts to declaring oneself pure and testifying to something about oneself that one does not know. If this testimony were true, he ought also to testify that he will enter Paradise if he dies in this state. Yet no one testifies that he himself will enter Paradise. His testimony that he is a believer is therefore like his testimony that he will enter Paradise if he dies in this state.

This was the basis adopted by the majority of the early generations who qualified their profession of faith, although they permitted leaving it unqualified when a different meaning was intended, as we shall explain, if Allah Most High wills.

Al-Khallāl said in Kitāb al-Sunnah (The Book of the Sunnah): Sulaymān ibn al-Ash‘ath—that is, Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī—narrated to us, saying: I was listening to Abū ‘Abd Allāh Ahmad ibn Hanbal when a man said to him:

“I was asked, ‘Are you a believer?’ and I replied, ‘Yes.’ Is there anything wrong with my saying that? Are people anything other than believers or disbelievers?”

Ahmad became angry and said:

“This is the language of irjā’. Allah Most High said: ‘And others are deferred