Continuation of the distinction between declaring something permissible and affirming it.

The Shaykh : The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) knew that this Companion did not believe in Allah and His Messenger except to escape from shirk (associating partners with Allah), but he did not notice the bad wording and bad expression that indicated that the will of Allah is coupled with the will of the Messenger of Allah, or that the will of the Messenger of Allah is coupled with the will of Allah. If a person believed this, he would be a disbeliever, without doubt, but this meaning did not occur to him. Therefore, the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) was content with a verbal denial, because the man had only fallen into verbal disbelief and not into the disbelief of the heart. Thus, he (peace and blessings be upon him) was content to deny his words only. The man who saw that vision in his dream, in which the Messenger said to him: , said, addressing his Companions whom he heard saying this phrase, that he was shy of them. If he had known that they were saying it intending its meaning, which is shirk itself, he would not have been shy of them. But because he (peace and blessings be upon him) had observed that they were, in their previous state of jahiliyyah (the pre-Islamic age of ignorance), lax in their expression, as we mentioned earlier that one of them would say, "My soul has become impure," the Messenger corrected them and said, "Let him say, 'My soul has become impure.'" They used such expressions even regarding the Essence of Allah (Blessed and Exalted is He). So here, both affirmation and declaring something permissible can be practical or they can be of the heart. Regarding declaring something permissible, the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) said in an authentic hadith in al-Bukhari, although its form with some hadith scholars is that of a suspended hadith: . This declaring something permissible can occur from these transformed people as a belief-based declaration of permissibility, and this is the apparent meaning due to the severity of the punishment the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him) reports in this hadith. It can also be a declaration of permissibility of the heart. Every sinner must have a declaration of permissibility in one of the two ways mentioned. Every sinner who drinks khamr (intoxicants), steals, commits zina (unlawful sexual intercourse), or eats riba (usury or interest)—all of these are without doubt fasiq (open sinners) and transgressors, and some of these matters are among the greatest of major sins, as came in some authentic hadiths. Do we rule that these people are disbelievers because they declared permissible what Allah (Mighty and Majestic) has forbidden? The answer is no. We do not say this, nor do we say the opposite. Rather, it is necessary to distinguish: whoever commits one of these forbidden things while acknowledging that it is contrary to his Lord, his disbelief is practical disbelief. And whoever declares it permissible in his heart and in his practice, his disbelief is belief-based disbelief. It is said of the person that he affirms the sin, meaning he does not deny it, or he declares it permissible practically in his soul. So either this affirmation and that declaration of permissibility are of the heart, in which case it is disbelief itself, or they are of the body, in which case it is a disbelief less than disbelief, as is authentic from Ibn 'Abbas.