Why Speak About These Groups?

Why speak about these groups? It is a point worth pausing on: why speak about these groups at all? The way this benefits us is this. These groups no longer exist in their formal group structure today; they have died out, and have been dealt with by the ʿulamāʾ over the course of our history; they no longer remain. There may be small pockets somewhere who still consider themselves, and are perhaps proud to call themselves, Muʿtazilī. And there are actually scholars: there is currently a scholar in Los Angeles who considers himself to be a follower of the Muʿtazilī ideology of rationalism. There are some small groups of people who consider themselves, and associate themselves, with these; but as a formal group they no longer remain, and have not been around for a long time.

The problem is that all of these groups have some adherents of their mode of thinking even today. So there are people today who would consider the Khawārij to be deviant, but who themselves have no problem with making takfīr: considering others among the believers to be unbelievers; considering them unbelievers for sins, not for a misunderstanding of their religion but for a sin. For committing a sin, or for not doing enough for a certain cause, or whatever, they are willing to label them kāfir. In fact, not just to label them kāfir, but to go out and actually kill them. And that is seen around the world. There are others who give rationality greater thought, and have their own opinions about Allah (swt) and how the dīn should be: "this is my opinion" is what they say.

So there are the Khawārij. There are the Khawārij. And there is now a whole opposing idea on the other side. This seems to have been a response to the Khawārij: to the claim that a sin will take a person out of Islam, the answer came that it does not. But they went to such an extreme that they said that good deeds do not even help in getting a person to paradise. As long as a person is a believer, he is going to be in paradise. As long as he is a believer; basically, what they said is that as long as a person has belief, bad deeds do not harm him. As long as he has belief, bad deeds do not harm him.

So where does his ṣalāh go? And where does that take him, in terms of complacency in his faith, in terms of taking the issues of dīn light-heartedly? These are just good things, to show thanks or whatever; in terms of the theological aspect of it, it does not really benefit a person, they say. A lot of people think like that today: that they are good people inside; that they do not think badly of anybody; that they are not harmful to anybody; that they do not harbour any jealousy towards anybody; that they do not pray and everything, do not cover, or whatever, but that this is what is most important. These are called the antinomians, or the postponers, because they put good deeds behind them: good deeds do not play a very big part in their lives, or in their theology.