Three Kinds of People

To proceed. Of the verses of Sūrat al-Baqarah, the concern here is with the first chapter. One of its great themes — this being, as it were, the first chapter of the Qur'an — is that humanity is divided into three principal categories. There is the muʾmin, the believer; the kāfir, the disbeliever; and the munāfiq, the hypocrite, who is a sort of hybrid attempting to stand between the two.

What matters, and here again is a lesson for us, is what it means to be a believer within the Qur'anic scheme. Five things are mentioned:

First, yuʾminūna bi-l-ghayb: īmān bi-l-ghayb, belief in the unseen, which is what distinguishes us. It is not an easy thing. What is seen is easy to believe. A man who places money — Allah forbid — in an interest-bearing bond watches it grow; he can see it, it appears rational, the money seems secure. The believer, by contrast, is told:

What is given in the path of Allah, Allah will increase and multiply seventy times over. That is belief in the unseen.

Second, the establishment of prayer — yuqīmūna al-ṣalāh — and zakāh. Prayer and zakāh are generally mentioned together, which tells us something of their standing among the most important matters. We cannot be careless in our ṣalāh. It must be performed. Those who pray five times and those who do not should alike resolve to begin with this Ramadan and continue thereafter, in shāʾ Allāh; and those who do pray should attend to their qaḍāʾ prayers, estimating what has been missed in the past and making it up, so that the account may be clear when we come before Allah (swt).

The fourth is belief in all the earlier books. The true and principal message of those books was monotheism, and with that we agree; what became of them after they were altered is another matter. And the fifth characteristic of a muʾmin is belief in the Hereafter, held without the least doubt. Islam and īmān admit no doubt in the system of belief. Doubt must be resolved, or it will create serious difficulty.

This was the crux of the matter. These five points are precisely what set the believers apart from the disbelievers, and above all from the munāfiqīn.