And Allah Most High sent the messengers to perfect human nature, so they showed people how to attain bliss in the Hereafter and escape its torment. The distinction between what is commanded and what is forbidden is thus like the distinction between Paradise and Hell, pleasure and pain, and bliss and torment. Whoever fails to perceive this distinction is excused if a cause for which he bears no blame has deprived him of reason. Otherwise, he is held accountable for the evil he has committed and the good he has neglected.

There is no doubt that some people may lose their reason in certain states. Others deliberately engage in things that deprive them of reason, such as drinking wine or listening to enrapturing sounds. The effects of such listening may become so powerful that its participants become intoxicated and devils attach themselves to them. They then kill one another during these intoxicating listening sessions, just as wine drinkers kill one another when drunk. Many people familiar with such spiritual states know this, yet some of them say that the person killed is a martyr.

The correct assessment is that the person killed resembles someone killed while drinking wine, for they entered a state of intoxication not sanctioned by the religion. Most of them, however, believe that this is one of the spiritual states of Allah’s pious friends. A person killed among them is therefore like someone killed during civil strife. He is not like the one who deliberately killed him, nor is he in every respect like someone killed unjustly.

If it is asked, “Does this annihilation suspend religious responsibility?” the answer is: If someone experiences something for which he is excused, and it deprives him of the reason by which he distinguishes between things, he is like someone asleep, unconscious, or intoxicated without incurring sin—for example, someone who became intoxicated before wine was prohibited, had wine poured into his mouth, or, according to the majority of scholars, was coerced into drinking it. If, however, the intoxication results from something forbidden, this is a matter of well-known disagreement among the scholars.