The real issue may now be dealt with. It has been shown, firstly, that though the Holy Qur’ān speaks of qadar or taqdīr, these words by no means carry the significance of predestination or of a decree of good and evil for man; secondly, that the qadar or taqdīr of which the Holy Book speaks is of a general nature, a law prevailing in the whole of the universe, a limitation under which the whole of creation is moving onward, and that therefore qadar or taqdīr has nothing to do with the good and evil deeds which are special to man; thirdly, that there is, in the Holy Qur’ān or in the most reliable ḥadīth, no mention at all of the necessity of faith (imān) in qadar or taqdīr; and fourthly, that it is never mentioned as one of the fundamentals of religion like faith in God and His angels and His books and His apostles and a life after death. Qadar or taqdīr is spoken of simply as a Divine law prevailing in the universe, like many other laws, and no question concerning faith in them arises. It must also be clearly understood that the fundamentals of religion are all fully explained in the Holy Qur’ān itself; and a thing cannot be accepted as a fundamental of Islām of which there is no mention in the Holy Book. Ḥadīth is only a secondary source of the religion of Islām and, as a matter of fact, it deals only with secondary matters of religion or its details. The great principles, the basic doctrines, must all be sought from the Holy Qur’ān, which neither mentions qadar among the fundamentals of Islām, nor even speaks of a faith in it. It is only in Ḥadīth that we find mention of qadar, and even here the most reliable of all collections, the Bukhārī, does not contain any report mentioning faith in qadar as an article of Islām. Thus to both the Holy Qur’ān and the Bukhārī, faith in qadar is unknown, and therefore to speak of it as a fundamental of Islām is a mistake.
There is indeed one ḥadīth which shows that faith in qadar is of later growth. In his second book, the book of Faith, Bukhārī relates the following report from Abū Hurairah: “The Holy Prophet was one day sitting outside among a number of people when there came to him a man and said, What is faith? The Holy Prophet replied, Faith is this