to the people.”

Many indeed are those who seek people’s approval while earning the Creator’s anger—may Allah protect us.

Such individuals live under Allah’s wrath even if everyone else is pleased with them; people’s approval will not profit them at all. Allah the Exalted says, “If you are pleased with them, Allah will never be pleased with the defiantly disobedient people” (Repentance 9:96). Even if the Prophet ﷺ himself—the noblest of all creation—were pleased with them, it would not avail them, for Allah is not pleased with a defiantly disobedient folk.

This verse, then, is a warning against fisq—open sinfulness—the gravest form of which is disbelief. Every act of fisq diminishes Allah’s pleasure with a person in proportion to its severity, for any ruling that is tied to a given quality grows stronger or weaker as that quality grows stronger or weaker. Fisq therefore bars one from Allah’s good pleasure: “If you are pleased with them, Allah will never be pleased with the defiantly disobedient people.”

Fisq comes in many forms and at various levels: disobeying one’s parents is fisq, severing ties of kinship is fisq, telling lies is fisq—indeed every sin is a type of fisq.

Minor sins, however, are erased by righteous deeds when those deeds are performed correctly, as Allah the Exalted says: “Establish the prayer from the decline of the sun until the darkness of the night, and recite the Qur’an at dawn; for the dawn recitation is ever witnessed” (Isra’ 17:78).