Allah’s mercy, however grave his sins may be, nor may he cause others to despair of Allah’s mercy. One of the early generations said: “The truly learned scholar is one who neither makes people despair of Allah’s mercy nor emboldens them to disobey Allah.”

Despair arises when a person believes that Allah will not forgive him: either he believes that, even if he repents, Allah will not accept his repentance and forgive his sins; or he says that his own soul will not yield to repentance. Rather, it has overpowered him, and Satan has gained mastery over him. He therefore despairs of ever repenting, even though he knows that Allah would forgive him if he repented. This afflicts many people.

Despair may arise in either of these two ways. The first is exemplified by “the monk who told the man who had killed ninety-nine people that Allah would not forgive him. So he killed the monk, bringing his total to one hundred. He was then directed to a scholar, whom he approached and questioned. The scholar told him that Allah would accept his repentance.” The hadith is recorded in the two Sahīh collections. The second is exemplified by someone who considers repentance to have many conditions, or is told that it has many conditions which he is unable to fulfil, and so despairs of repenting.

People have disputed whether a person can reach a state in which repentance is impossible for him even if he wishes to repent. The correct view, held by Ahl al-Sunnah and the majority of scholars, is that repentance is possible from every sin, and that Allah may forgive it. In discussing this, they have proposed hypothetical cases: someone who finds himself in the middle of unlawfully seized land, and someone surrounded by wounded people, such that any movement he makes will kill some of them. It has been said that such a person has no way to repent. The correct view, however, is that if he repents, Allah will accept his repentance.