on a condition, then, like anything else made conditional, it comes into being only when that condition is fulfilled.

They said:

“The fulfilment of the condition of divine willing, for which the speaker hopes, cannot be ascertained until the Day of Resurrection. If he makes his resolve to act contingent upon assent and affirmation, then the divine will has become manifest and the commitment is valid, so there is no point in qualifying it. Moreover, a qualification appended to a statement nullifies it, so the profession of faith and the commitment no longer leave one a believer. The person who attaches this qualification to his faith may imagine that his assent remains intact, whereas the qualification removes it.”

I say:

Their reasoning in this matter applies only to someone who makes his initial profession of faith conditional upon Allah’s will. An example is someone who wishes to enter Islam and is told, “Believe,” but replies, “I shall believe if Allah wills,” or, “I have believed if He wills,” or, “I have embraced Islam if Allah wills,” or, “I bear witness, if Allah wills, that there is no deity worthy of worship except Allah, and I bear witness, if Allah wills, that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”

Those among the early and later generations who qualified their profession of faith did not intend to qualify the act of professing faith itself. Rather, their qualification concerned their report of the faith they already possessed. They qualified it either because faith in its unrestricted sense entails entry into Paradise, while they did not know how their lives would end—as though asking a man, “Are you a believer?” meant asking him, “Are you a believer in Allah’s sight, destined for Paradise?” He would then reply, “I am, if Allah wills”—or because they did not know whether they had fulfilled all that obligatory faith requires.

For this reason, when some of them were asked, “Are you a believer?” they would answer, “I believe in Allah, His angels, and His Books,” affirming this categorically without making it conditional. Or one would say, “If you mean