one from being able to do otherwise says: “If someone is charged with doing the contrary of what is known beforehand, he has been charged with something beyond his capacity.” Likewise, whoever holds that an accident does not endure for two successive moments says that the capacity preceding an act does not endure until the act occurs.

In reality, this is not a dispute over whether the acts Allah has commanded or forbidden fall within the scope of religious obligation. Rather, it concerns whether those acts lie beyond a person’s capacity when he refrains from performing them, and before he performs them. We have already explained that capacity is of two kinds, and that the unqualified assertion that capacity exists only together with the act contradicts what appears in the Quran and Sunnah and what the early generations of this community and its leading scholars agreed upon—just as an unqualified assertion of compulsion does.

Nevertheless, some groups affiliated with the Sunnah have made this unqualified assertion in their refutations of the Qadariyyah. They include followers of Imam Ahmad and other leading scholars of the Sunnah, such as Abū al-Hasan, Abū Bakr ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn Hāmid, al-Qādī Abū Bakr, al-Qādī Abū Yaʿlā, Abū al-Maʿālī, Abū al-Hasan ibn al-Zāghūnī, and others. Yet the majority of scholars, including Abū al-ʿAbbās ibn Surayj, Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Qalānisī, and others, have rejected this unqualified assertion. This rejection has also been transmitted from Abū Hanīfah himself, and it is what the statements of all the imams entail. For this reason, Abū Ishāq ibn Shāqlā refrained from making that unqualified assertion.

He related both positions on the matter, saying—as reported from him by al-Qādī Abū Yaʿlā:

“Does capacity exist together with the act or before it? One side argues that prayer, pilgrimage, and jihad may not be enjoined upon someone who lacks the capacity to perform them.