We request, as a kindness from Shaykh al-Islam, the mufti of mankind, Taqī al-Dīn—may Allah reward him with Paradise—that he give us a ruling concerning two men who disputed the following two lines of verse:

The Lord is real, and the servant is real … Would that I knew: who is bound by duty?
If you say, ‘The servant,’ he is dead … If you say, ‘The Lord,’ how could He be bound by duty?

One of the two men said:
“This statement is unbelief, for its author has made the Lord and the servant a single reality, with no distinction between them, and has nullified religious obligation.”

The second man replied:
“You have not understood the meaning, and you have accused the author of something he neither believed nor intended. He said, ‘The Lord is real, and the servant is real,’ meaning that the Lord is real in His lordship, and the servant is real in his servitude. The Lord is not a servant, nor is the servant a lord, as you alleged.

“He then said, ‘Would that I knew: who is bound by duty?’ while knowing that religious obligation is real. He was perplexed as to whom to attribute its fulfilment, and so he said, ‘If you say, “The servant,” he is dead.’ A dead man cannot move of his own accord; rather, someone else turns him as he wishes. The same is true of the servant—even if he is