A person does not become upright merely by knowing the truth without loving it, desiring it, and following it. Likewise, his felicity does not consist in knowing Allah and acknowledging what He deserves without loving, worshipping, and obeying Him. Rather, the person most severely punished on the Day of Resurrection will be a scholar whose knowledge Allah did not make beneficial to him. When a person knows the truth but hates it and opposes it, he deserves a measure of Allah’s wrath and punishment that someone unlike him does not deserve. Similarly, someone who intends and seeks the truth—but is ignorant of what he seeks and the path to it—is affected by misguidance and deserves a measure of the curse—which means being far removed from Allah’s mercy—that someone unlike him does not deserve.
For this reason, Allah has commanded us to say:
“Guide us to the straight path—the path of those You have blessed, not of those who have incurred Your wrath, nor of those who have gone astray.”
“Those who have incurred wrath” knew the truth but neither loved nor followed it. “Those who have gone astray” sought the truth, but were ignorant and misguided concerning both the truth and the path to it. The former resembles a wicked scholar, and the latter an ignorant worshipper. The former is the condition of the Jews, who have incurred wrath; the latter is the condition of the Christians, who have gone astray. As is authentically reported from the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, he said:
“The Jews have incurred wrath, and the Christians have gone astray.”
The “philosophers” are in a worse condition than the Jews and Christians, for they combine the ignorance and misguidance of the latter with the wickedness and wrongdoing of the former. Thus, they possess a degree of ignorance and wrongdoing found in neither the Jews nor the Christians. They locate felicity merely in knowing realities, so that a person becomes an intelligible world corresponding to the existing world. Yet they acquired no knowledge of Allah