It remains to ask: Why, then, is piety accorded such importance?

The answer is that it preserves the innate nature and prevents its corruption. The servant needs to safeguard this nature because innate love requires no stimulus. Hence, the foremost concern of the messengers’ call was sincere devotion to Allah alone and the prohibition of associating partners with Him. Innate acknowledgment is already present because its underlying cause exists; what is needed is to purify it and ward off the association of partners with Allah.

This is also why people need governance that prevents them from wronging one another and enables them to benefit one another, just as Allah has enjoined beneficial zakat and forbidden harmful usury. The foundation of religion is the worship of Allah, which rests upon love, turning to Him, and turning away from all besides Him. This is the innate nature upon which He created humankind.

Concerning this love, which is the foundation of religion, a group among the deviants of the Mosaic tradition—jurists and speculative theologians—went astray, to the point of denying it. They claimed that love for Allah means nothing more than the will to worship Him. Moreover, many of them neglect to act upon what they have been commanded to do: they enjoin righteousness upon others and forget themselves. This is widespread among them: the absence of both love and action.

A group among the deviants of the tradition of Jesus—Sufis and devout worshippers—mingled this love with love for what Allah hates. They rejected hatred and aversion, so they neither condemned anything nor instilled aversion to it, or fell short in aversion and condemnation. They included forms, sounds, and love for rivals to Allah within this love. Thus, the wayward among the former were subject to wrath and a curse arising from