Five Answers to One Question

The atlas records the positions that formed around the standing of the sinning believer, each presented as the considered view of a movement rather than a deviation.

The Kharijites held that the grave sinner is thereby an unbeliever, and drew fierce practical conclusions; their modern descendants, the Ibadis, reject the extreme form. The Murji'a took the opposite line: judgement on the sinner is deferred to God, and faith in the heart is not cancelled by wrong action, a position later partly absorbed into mainstream Sunnism. The Mu'tazila proposed an intermediate standing, the grave sinner being neither believer nor unbeliever but in a category between. The mainstream Sunni theologians, al-Ash'ari, al-Maturidi and Ahmad ibn Hanbal, settled on the view that faith increases with obedience and decreases with sin, but that the sinner remains a believer, spared the takfir of the Kharijites and the limbo of the Mu'tazila. Twelver Shia theology frames faith around its own "five roots," including divine justice and the imamate, so that acknowledgement of the rightful Imams belongs to the content of faith itself. The dispute is not antiquarian: the Kharijite logic of declaring other Muslims unbelievers (takfir) recurs whenever modern movements revive it, and the mainstream rejection of that logic traces directly to this early settlement.