The causes that remove punishment for sins

While answering the charges Ibn al-Mutahhar al-Hilli brought against Uthman and other Companions, Ibn Taymiyya sets out in Minhaj al-Sunna a comprehensive principle: sins, from any believer, are a cause of punishment, but punishment for them in the hereafter, in Hell, is averted by about ten causes. ¹

Just before, Ibn Taymiyya states that he does not testify of any senior Companion – Uthman, Ali, Talha, al-Zubayr – that he never sinned; he testifies rather that if one of them sinned, God will not punish him in the hereafter or send him to the Fire, but the punishment of the hereafter is removed from him by his repentance, or his many good deeds, or something else. ² In this context he mentions that the killer of Ammar ibn Yasir (may God be pleased with him) was Abu al-Ghadiya, of whom it has been said, as Ibn Hazm recorded, that he was among those who took the Pledge of Ridwan. ²

First: repentance. One who repents of a sin is like one who has no sin, and repentance is accepted for every sin – unbelief, iniquity and disobedience. He cites verses calling unbelievers, apostates and those who persecuted the believers to repent, and al-Hasan al-Basri's remark on the people of the trench: "Look at this generosity: they tortured His friends, and He calls them to repent." ¹ He mentions Ali's regret for things he did in the fighting, his praise during the nights of Siffin for the stand of Abd Allah ibn Umar and Sa'd ibn Malik, and his saying to his son al-Hasan that he wished he had died twenty years earlier. ³ What counts, he holds, is the perfection of the end, not the shortcomings of the beginning; a sin followed by repentance gives its doer a servanthood and humility he did not have before, and he quotes some of the early generations: a servant may commit a sin and enter Paradise by it, and do a good deed, admire himself for it, and enter the Fire. ³

Second: asking forgiveness. It is a request for pardon, a kind of supplication, usually joined to repentance, though a person may repent without supplicating or supplicate without repenting; he cites the divine saying in the two Sahihs about the servant who sins and asks forgiveness again and again. He states that repentance alone erases all sins, unlike the other causes. ⁴

Third: good deeds. God erases bad deeds by good ones, and the merit and reward of deeds lie, for him, not in their outward forms but in their realities in the heart. Here he relates two views recorded by al-Qadi Iyad on whether every single Companion is superior to everyone after them, the majority holding that he is – a view reported from Ibn al-Mubarak and Ahmad ibn Hanbal – and cites the hadith "If one of you spent the like of Uhud in gold, it would not reach a handful of one of them, nor half of it". ^{5 6}

Fourth: the prayers of the believers. Muslims have never ceased to pray for the Companions. ⁶

Fifth: the Prophet's prayer and request for forgiveness, in his life and after his death, and his intercession on the Day of Resurrection, of which the Companions have the greatest share. ⁶

Sixth: what is done for the dead after death – good works gifted to them, such as charity, pilgrimage and fasting on their behalf; he says that sound hadiths establish that these reach the dead, and distinguishes them from the prayer of one's child, which counts as the dead person's own work, citing "When the son of Adam dies, his work ends except for three". ⁶

Seventh: worldly afflictions, by which God expiates sins. ⁶

Eighth, ninth and tenth: what the believer undergoes in the grave – its squeezing and the trial of the two angels; the distress of the terrors of the Day of Resurrection; and what is established in the two Sahihs, that when the believers have crossed the Sirat they are halted on a bridge between Paradise and Hell and scores among them are settled. ⁷

Ibn Taymiyya concludes that few believers miss all of these causes – so how much less the Companions, the best generation of the community? And this concerns sins that really occurred; what of those falsely attributed to them, or deeds counted among their faults that are in fact among their merits? He then relates the story of the man who disparaged Uthman before Ibn Umar. ^{7 8}

The principle is given here from Minhaj al-Sunna alone; its formulations in Ibn Taymiyya's other works, and the positions of the Mu'tazila and Khawarij on grave sinners from their own sources, have not yet been added.