and Muslims agree that this is permissible. Indeed, most commands and prohibitions are of this kind. But whether this is called imposing obligations beyond one’s ability is disputed.

It is said that a servant has the ability to act only when actually acting, and that ability exists only together with the act. This is the position of Abū al-Hasan al-Asharī and many speculative theologians who affirm divine decree. According to their position, everyone charged with an obligation is, at the time it is imposed, charged with something beyond his ability at that moment, although he may be able to perform it when he acts, through an ability that Allah creates for him at that time. His inability here, however, is due to his being occupied with the opposite action and lacking the ability that accompanies the act, not to his being incapacitated.

As for those who are incapacitated—the disabled person who cannot walk, the blind person who cannot see, and others like them—they have not been charged with what they are incapable of doing. All Muslim groups agree that obligations of this kind have not been imposed in the revealed Law, apart from a small handful of later scholars who claimed that such obligations do occur in it. They attributed this position to al-Asharī and most of his followers, but this is a mistaken attribution.

As for the rational permissibility of imposing such obligations, most of the Muslim community denied it without qualification. A group of those who affirm divine decree, comprising followers of Abū al-Hasan al-Asharī and those who agreed with them among the followers of Mālik, al-Shāfiī, and Ahmad—such as Ibn Aqīl, Ibn al-Jawzī, and others—held it to be rationally permissible.

A “third group” distinguished, with regard to rational permissibility, between what is possible in itself, which