Ibn Taymiyyah (رحمه الله) said:[1]
Whoever said: That the obligatory īmān (al-īmān al-wājib) is attained without doing anything of the obligatory deeds - irrespective of whether he made those obligatory deeds to be necessary to īmān (lāzim lahū) or a part of it (juzʾ), as this is only a difference in wording - then he is in plain manifest error and this is the bidʿah of Irjāʾ about whose proponents the Salaf and the Imāms spoke severely against, and they said very harsh statements about it which are well-known. And the prayer is, the greatest, the broadest, the first and the loftiest of them (the obligations).
In the above quote, Ibn Taymiyyah states that whether you say outward actions are necessary to īmān or a part of it—so this includes those who affirm actions are from and necessary to īmān—if you claim alongside this affirmation that a person can have the obligatory īman established in his heart without bringing any of the obligatory deeds, then this is the bidʿah of Irjāʾ that he Salaf warned against and severely condemned.
This means that a man who does not pray, fast, give zakāh, or do any of the obligations, he, according to this doctrine of the Murjiʾah, is complete in his īmān. This is because they treat īmān to be a single, indivisible entity whose place is in the heart only, through knowledge and belief (maʿrifah, taṣdīq) alone, or in the heart coupled with the statement of the tongue (the shaḥādah). Effectively, they eliminate the actions of the heart (compliance, love, fear, hope, awe, humility etc.) from īmān.
These inward actions of the heart are inextricably linked to the outward actions of the limbs. Thus, whoever has the obligatory or complete īmān in his heart, then this can only be in the presence of the performance of the outward obligations. Thus, the believers vary greatly in terms of their inward and outward īmān, based upon their knowledge and practice.
But according to this doctrine, the īmān of the most neglectful and sinful of people is equivalent to the īmān of Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه), because the completion of īmān returns only to what is in the heart of knowledge of Allāh (maʿrifah), assent or belief (taṣdīq), without actions.
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Footnotes
1. Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā (7/621).
