and prophets, the steadfastly truthful, the martyrs, and the righteous, and that doing so is either obligatory or recommended. The path followed by Allah’s friends consists entirely of fulfilling obligations and performing recommended deeds, for anything else is forbidden, disliked, or merely permissible and of no religious benefit.

What led these people into this error was that they found many people asking Allah to bring them benefit and ward off harm—even asking for Paradise and seeking refuge from the Fire—not because doing so is worship, obedience, and goodness, but because their souls desire these things. They therefore thought that the path required abandoning whatever the soul chooses and desires, and that none of them should have any will whatsoever; rather, his aim—whoever he may be—should be to let himself be carried along by the divine decree.

This is what led many of them into monasticism and departure from the Sharia, to the point that they gave up food, drink, clothing, and marriage that they needed and without which their religious well-being could not be secured. For they saw that ordinary people treated these matters as dictated by natural inclination, desire, and habit. It is well known that actions performed in this manner do not constitute worship, obedience, or a means of drawing near to Allah. Those people therefore regarded the path to Allah as abandoning these acts of worship and natural activities. They persisted in hunger, sleeplessness, seclusion, silence, and other practices involving the renunciation of pleasures and the endurance of hardships, to such an extent that they fell into abandoning obligatory and recommended deeds and committing disliked and forbidden acts.