a Muslim?” And Allah Most High says:
“O you who believe, when believing women come to you as emigrants, examine them. Allah knows best their faith. If you find them to be believers, do not send them back to the disbelievers.”
This shows that merely displaying Islam is not evidence of inward faith. Were it otherwise, the emigrant women who came as Muslims would not have needed to be examined. It also shows that examination and testing reveal a person’s inward state, so that it becomes known whether he is a believer or not. Thus, in the hadith traced back to the Prophet:
“If you see a man regularly attending the mosque, testify to his faith, for Allah says: ‘The mosques of Allah are maintained only by those who believe in Allah and the Last Day, establish prayer, give zakah, and fear none but Allah’—to the end of the verse.”
If it is said: “Outward deeds sometimes result from faith and sometimes from something else. Uttering the two testimonies of faith, for example, sometimes results from faith in the heart and sometimes amounts to dissimulation, as with the faith professed by the hypocrites. Allah Most High says: ‘Among the people are those who say, “We believe in Allah and the Last Day,” yet they are not believers.’ When we call these deeds a fruit of faith, we mean when they proceed from faith in the heart, not from hypocrisy.”
The response is: If they proceed from faith, then either faith itself necessitates them, or they depend on something else. If faith itself necessitates them, this establishes that they necessarily accompany faith in the heart as an effect inseparable from it. This is precisely the point to be established. If, however, they depend on something else, faith would be part of the cause; this would make them a fruit and effect of the other part, since in reality they are an effect and fruit of both together. It thus becomes clear that righteous outward deeds cannot be a fruit of inward faith and an effect