—namely, what is not beneficial. Benefit consists in attaining blessing, pleasure, and happiness, which means attaining pleasure and warding off pain: attaining what is sought and escaping what is feared, attaining bliss and escaping torment, and attaining good and escaping evil.
What exists and what is beneficial may be enduring and lasting, or may come to an end, especially when it lasts only a short time. Thus, “falsehood” is often applied to benefit that does not last and existence that does not endure. As it is said, “Death is truth, and life is vanity.” In its essential sense, the term applies to that whose benefits are neither unalloyed nor preponderant, as discussed earlier concerning what should be renounced—namely, what is not beneficial.
Benefit in the unqualified sense is that which is unalloyed or preponderant. But a benefit that entails forfeiting a greater one, or is followed by harm no less than itself, is, on balance, vain. Harm is more deserving of the designation “falsehood” than benefit is. As for something thought to contain benefit when it does not, or something that affords a corrupt pleasure, it contains no benefit whatsoever.
These, then, are the things that it is prescribed to renounce and abandon; they are vain. Accordingly, whatever Allah and His Messenger have forbidden is vain: it cannot contain any benefit that is unalloyed or preponderant. Hence the deeds of the disbelievers and hypocrites are nullified, as He says:
“Do not invalidate your charities with reminders of your generosity and hurtful conduct, like one who spends his wealth to be seen by people and does not believe in Allah and the Last Day. His likeness is that of a smooth stone covered with dust”—to the end of the verse.
He states that the charity of one who shows off and one who reminds others of his generosity is nullified, leaving him no benefit. Likewise are His words, Most High:
“O you who believe, obey Allah and obey the Messenger, and do not invalidate your deeds.”
The same applies to the nullification of deeds in