by its keepers, ‘Did no warner come to you?’”

“They will say, ‘Yes, a warner did come to us, but we denied him and said, “Allah has not sent down anything.”’”

And His words:

“Had We destroyed them with a punishment before him, they would have said, ‘Our Lord, why did You not send us a messenger so that we could have followed Your verses before we were humiliated and disgraced?’”

And His words:

“Were it not that a calamity might befall them because of what their own hands have sent forth, and they would say, ‘Our Lord, why did You not send us a messenger so that we could have followed Your verses and been among the believers?’”

There are many similar passages in the Quran. If someone believes in Allah and His Messenger but is unaware of some of what the Messenger brought, and therefore does not believe in those particulars—whether because he has not heard them, has heard them through a channel that does not require him to accept them as true, or has understood them differently through an excusable interpretation—then he has been granted faith in Allah and His Messenger that warrants Allah’s rewarding him for it. As for what he has not believed in, the proof whose rejection constitutes unbelief has not been established against him concerning it.

Furthermore, the Quran, the Sunnah, and consensus establish that certain errors in religion do not render the person who makes them an unbeliever, or even a transgressor; indeed, he incurs no sin at all. Such is the case with errors in subsidiary matters of practice. Although some scholastic theologians and jurists believe that whoever errs in these matters incurs sin, while others believe that everyone exercising independent scholarly judgment in them is correct, both views are anomalous. Even so, no one has declared the scholars who exercise independent judgment and disagree over these matters to be unbelievers. Yet, in some of these questions, the error of the dissenting party has been established