than to safety, and they are nearer to blame than to commendation.

These questions with which a person burdens himself belong to the realm of the unseen. They were never raised by those better than he and more eager to know Allah through His Names and attributes. He must therefore hold his tongue and simply say, “We hear, we obey, we affirm, and we believe.” To go digging into matters of the unseen is, without doubt, an act of extremism.

A related error occurs when some students insert purely rational possibilities into textual proofs. You will hear one of them say, “It could mean this, and it could mean that,” until the benefit of the passage is lost and the entire text becomes shaky and useless. This is a mistake. Take the texts at face value and leave aside such intellectual conjectures. If we were to unleash rational possibilities upon every verbal proof in the Book of Allah and the Sunnah of His Messenger ﷺ, not a single hadith or verse would remain for anyone to cite; all of them could be undermined. Many of these so-called rational notions are nothing but fantasies and whispers from Satan, cast into a person’s heart to unsettle his creed and faith—may Allah protect us.

Another example is what some overly scrupulous people do in wuḍūʾ (ritual ablution). You will see one of them washing three, four, five, seven times, or even more, though he is perfectly exempt from such hardship. It is related that Ibn ʿAbbās d. 68 AH would perform wuḍūʾ and the ground beneath him would show only a few drops of water, so little did he use. Yet some people go to extremes with water, and Allah makes matters hard for them. If he gives in to these misgivings, four, five, six, or even a greater number of washes will never satisfy him