For the man not capable of deep thought, it is sufficient to accept that God is one, Muhammad is His Messenger, the Quran is His Book, and that we have to appear before Him on the day of Judgment. For the man who can think, this brevity contains such breadth that he can follow numerous paths in the search of truth, in accordance with his capability and aptitude. He can go as far as he likes. He can spend his entire life in this search, without ever reaching a stage where he could say that he had understood all that he could. Whatever path a thinking man may take for his enquiry and search, and however far he may go, as long as he walks within the limits which the word of Allah has drawn between Islam and kufr, he cannot be declared as excluded from the fold of the faith, no matter how much we may differ with the wanderings of his mind.
For instance, the essence of belief in Allah is only that there is God Who is the Creator and Maintainer of the universe, and only He is worthy of worship. The way in which a simple peasant can accept this, it is not possible that a thinking man could also accept it in the same simple way. Then, the detailed concepts of God, His attributes, and the nature of His relation with the creation, which a man of a particular type of aptitude will develop in his mind through thinking, will not be exactly the same as the concepts of a man of a different aptitude about these matters. But as long as all of them believe in the real basic belief, they are all Muslims, no matter how widely their thoughts differ about the details, and no matter how much they may have stumbled in various places.
Similarly, as regards the Islamic beliefs in revelation, prophethood, angels and the Last Day, there are only a few points of principle which should be called the essentials of faith. The rest are details, for some of which man can find explicit or implicit indications in the word of God, and some are created by man himself in his mind in accordance with his thinking. It is very possible that in determining most of these details a man’s reason may be at fault, and his ideas may stray very far from the truth. But so long as he does not let go of the essence of these beliefs, no error of reason or thought can possibly expel him from the fold of the faith, however far he may go from the centre of the faith, and however much we may have to rebuke and reproach him for these deviations of belief.
At this point, we can understand with a little thought how sects in Islam came into being. The Quran and Hadith contain simple and brief statements about the essentials of the religion. The subtle references that are given about the details of these matters have been understood by different people in different ways, in accordance with their mental capabilities and natural inclinations. In understanding these details by the use of inference and reasoning, people deduced separate types of secondary matters and side-issues. So far, there was no problem, nor was there anything wrong in one group considering its own stand-point to be true and arguing with other groups to draw them towards the same. But the calamity was that, by going to an extreme, people added their own derived and reasoned beliefs to the principles and essentials of the religion, and then every group started to call all those groups as kafir who denied their derived beliefs. Here began the war of beliefs, and this was the starting point of that injustice. It is true that many of the ways followed in the matter of beliefs, by the use of inference and interpretation, are wrong. But every error is not necessarily kufr. It is undoubtedly permissible to call an error an error, and to believe its perpetrator to be misguided and at fault, and to try to bring him to the right path. But as long as a person does not deny the basic fact which Allah has commanded one to believe, it is not at all permissible to call him a kafir, no matter how extensive his error becomes.
