and forbidding wrong, striving in Allah’s cause, and other duties incumbent upon him that benefit people in their religious and worldly affairs. Or he performs these duties not as worship of Allah Most High, but merely as an imposed obligation or the like.

Such scrupulousness may lead a person into grave religious innovations. The scrupulousness of the Khawārij, the Rāfidah, the Mu‘tazilah and others like them is of this kind. They scrupulously avoided injustice and what they believed to be injustice, such as associating with those they considered wrongdoers, until they abandoned major obligations: Friday and congregational prayers, Hajj, striving in Allah’s cause, sincere counsel to Muslims and compassion towards them. Those practising this kind of scrupulousness were censured by the leading scholars, including the four imams, and their case came to be discussed in expositions of the creed of Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamā‘ah.

The second source of error concerns unsound beliefs. When someone performs obligatory and doubtful acts, and refrains from forbidden and doubtful acts, his belief that something is obligatory or forbidden must rest on evidence from the Quran and Sunnah and on knowledge, not personal inclination. Many people feel an aversion to certain things because of habit or similar influences, which reinforces their belief that those things are forbidden or doubtful. Some harbour illusions and false suspicions, and these suspicions rest upon misguided scrupulousness. Such a person is among those of whom Allah Most High says:

“They follow nothing but conjecture and what their souls desire.”

This is the condition of those afflicted by obsessive doubts concerning ritual impurities. Their misguided scrupulousness combines a measure of religiosity with weakness of intellect and knowledge. The same applies to the scrupulousness of people who consider most people’s wealth unlawful