and your lack of faith is a sign of punishment.” Likewise, His command to believe, addressed to someone He knows will believe, means: “I intend to reward you, and faith is a sign.” Some of these people reject analogy in revealed law and the attribution of legal rulings to underlying causes. Those among them who affirm analogy regard these causes as mere signs. Yet they know that the ruling in the original case is established by the revealed text and consensus, which provide evidence for it. What need, then, is there for the underlying cause? How can that cause conceivably be a sign of the ruling in the original case, when its cause is sought only after the existence of Hell is known to be established? At that point, the sign serves no purpose.

As for the new case, something cannot be its underlying cause unless it is also the underlying cause in the original case. Some of these people deny that legal causes are appropriate to their rulings, saying: “Appropriateness is not a means of identifying legal causes.” These constitute the majority of those who hold this view. Those among their later adherents who accept appropriateness say that revealed law has been observed to take it into account. They thus infer the cause from mere association, not because the Lawgiver prescribed His ruling to secure the benefit sought through it or to avert any harm whatsoever. For, according to them, there is no “in order to” in either His creation or His commands.

Thus Jahm—the leading figure of the determinists—and his followers stand at one extreme, while the Qadariyyah stand at the other. As for the Companions, those who followed them in righteousness, the imams of Islam—including the renowned jurists and others—and those who follow their path among scholars of jurisprudence and hadith and theologians discussing the foundations of religion and the principles of jurisprudence, they affirm divine decree, affirm revealed law, and affirm Allah’s wisdom in His creation and His commands—although an individual among them may or may not know that wisdom—