them, though their souls were convinced of their truth, out of injustice and arrogance.”

And His words:

“Those to whom We have given the Scripture recognize him as they recognize their own sons.”

And His words:

“It is not you they disbelieve; rather, it is Allah’s signs that the wrongdoers deny.”

They said: Iblīs neither disbelieved any report nor denied the truth, for Allah commanded him without a messenger. Rather, he disobeyed and acted arrogantly. Thus, he was an unbeliever without inwardly disbelieving. This matter is examined in detail elsewhere.

After these views, the doctrine of the Karrāmiyyah arose: faith consists in verbal profession without the heart’s assent. Yet they also held that such a person would be punished in the Hereafter and remain in the Fire forever.

Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Sālihī said that faith consists solely in the heart’s assent and knowledge, but necessarily entails certain things: if these are absent, this indicates that the heart’s assent is absent. Any outward statement or action that the revealed law identifies as unbelief is so designated because it indicates the absence of the heart’s assent and knowledge. Unbelief consists only in that one characteristic, and faith consists only in the assent and knowledge within the heart.

This is the better-known of the two positions attributed to Abū al-Hasan al-Ash‘arī. His followers, such as al-Qādī Abū Bakr, Abū al-Ma‘ālī, and others like them, adopted it. For this reason, writers on doctrinal schools classified them among the Murji’ah. The other position reported from him agrees with that of the early generations and the scholars of hadith: faith consists in speech and action. A group of his followers adopted this position.

Nevertheless, he and the majority of his followers agreed with the scholars of hadith concerning qualifying one’s profession of faith by saying, “if Allah wills.” In his view, unqualified faith is the faith in which one ultimately dies, and this is what that qualification refers to;