the sweetness of faith, just as happens with the intoxication of wine or of one infatuated with physical beauty.

Likewise, passing away may result from a state of fear or hope, just as it may result from a state of love. The heart then loses awareness of certain realities, and the person says or does things resembling the behaviour of the intoxicated. Such are the ecstatic excesses of certain shaykhs—for example, one of them saying, “I shall pitch my tent over Hell,” and similar statements and actions contrary to the revealed Law.

The person responsible may be free of sin. If he is not, this category resembles the case of those who protect the enemy, or someone who assists an unbeliever or an oppressor through a spiritual state and claims to be overpowered by it. The ruling concerning such people is that, if someone loses his reason through a cause that is not forbidden, he incurs no blame for the forbidden statements or actions that proceed from him. This differs from the case in which his loss of reason and the state that overwhelms him arise from something forbidden.

This is as we have said concerning the “sane madmen” and those bewildered by ecstasy, for whom this has become a permanent condition, whereas it overtakes these others only at certain times. Some scholars have made the same distinction concerning someone whose loss of reason causes him to neglect an obligation: if he loses his reason through a cause that is not forbidden—such as fainting through illness, or being forcibly made to drink something that deprives him of his reason—he incurs no sin. But if he loses it through drinking wine or through similar forbidden states, he sins by neglecting the obligation. The same applies to committing a forbidden act.

Although they incur no blame, it is not permissible to follow their example or to construe their words and deeds as sound. Rather, in the sphere of the spiritual elite, they are like the heedless and the insane with respect to religious obligations