so that their absence is taken as evidence of its absence.

Each of the two groups regarded the early generations, the community, and the scholars of hadith as inconsistent because they said, “Faith consists of words and deeds,” yet also maintained that it does not disappear when some deeds are absent. Indeed, Ibn al-Khatīb and others like him considered al-Shāfi‘ī inconsistent on this point. Al-Shāfi‘ī was one of the leading scholars of the Sunnah, and his statements refuting the Murji’ah are well known. In the Book of Purification in al-Umm, he recorded the consensus of the Companions, their successors, and the generation following them upon the position of Ahl al-Sunnah. When Ibn al-Khatīb wrote a work on this subject—himself holding the position of Jahm and al-Sālihī concerning faith—he found al-Shāfi‘ī’s statement problematic and considered it contradictory.

The crux of their specious argument is that a composite entity ceases to exist when some of its constituent parts are removed. Take ten, for example: if part of it is removed, it is no longer ten. The same applies to physical compounds such as sakanjabīn: if either of its two ingredients is removed, it ceases to be sakanjabīn. They argued that if faith consists of outward and inward words and deeds, it must cease to exist when some of these are absent. This is the position of the Khawārij and Mu‘tazilah.

They further argued: “It would also follow that a person could be a believer by virtue of the faith within him and a disbeliever by virtue of the disbelief within him, so that both disbelief and faith would coexist in him.” They claimed that this was contrary to consensus.

It was because of this specious argument—and Allah knows best—that some leading jurists declined to say that faith decreases. It is as though they thought that affirming its decrease would necessarily imply its complete disappearance, whereas affirming its increase would not.