Reconciling the hadith: “Indeed, Allah has pardoned my Ummah for what their souls have whispered to them, as long as they have not spoken of it or acted upon it,” with the hadith

The questioner : He says after that: And among them is his saying (peace and blessings be upon him): .

The Shaykh : This, too, is like the previous one, in the sense that a person sometimes doubts whether a certain action is a sin or not. He wonders, “Is this action a sin or not?” The doubt may come from his own scholarly study, or because he has heard differing opinions from scholars regarding it. Here, the Messenger (peace be upon him) says to him: So here, you will be held accountable if you perform an action that your heart tells you is a sin. The accountability here is not for a mere thought that flashes through the mind that it is a sin; no, rather, it is when one performs an action in which there are different perspectives and scholarly disagreement—some saying it is permissible, others saying it is not—but it nags in his heart that there is something wrong with this action, so it is a sin and not permissible for him to do it in this state.