There are two entirely different questions that the words īmān and kufr can be made to answer, and almost all the confusion surrounding them comes from mistaking one for the other.
The first is existential: where does a person stand in relation to the Covenant – are they faithful to it or do they cover it over, draw near to it or break trust with it?
The second is political: does this person belong to the covenant community as an enforced political order, or do they stand outside it among those who reject its authority?
The Proclamation presses the first question relentlessly and the second comes up in the context of the a’rāb (desert Arabs). The later history of the tradition expressed through various empires reversed that proportion, and we have been living inside the inversion in the modern age.
How God Weighs a Soul
In its own voice, the final Proclamation (al-Qur’ān) is not resolving membership in a “religion” and such an assertion would be erroneously anachronistic. It is describing a relationship and the postures a person can take existentially. Submission to God as observance and upholding the Covenant Code is an orientation and an ancient covenant (‘ahd) continued from Abraham. His Israelite and Ishmaelite descendants as well as all those who join them in the orientation are addressed by it. The only live question is whether you keep faith with what you have been given to know.
This is why the semantics of kufr matter so much, and why the conventional rendering “disbelief” misleads at almost every turn. The root carries the sense of covering, burying, concealing, such as the farmer who covers the seed in the soil is a kāfir in the old usage (57:20). To be ungrateful is to cover over a benefit you have received, and to break faith is to cover over a truth you already hold. Kufr, then, is not the absence of a doctrinal proposition in the mind and has nothing to do with doctrines (another invented formulation), it is the active concealment of an acknowledged debt: unfaithfulness to a bond one knows oneself to be under. Its true opposite is not “belief” as a cognitive state but īmān: trust kept, the trustworthiness of one who guards what has been entrusted to them. The disposition that holds the whole thing together is taqwā – not the abstract piety of rabbinical manuals but loyalty: the wary care of someone who doesn’t want to betray a relationship that matters.
The Proclamation is not sorting humanity into two simplistic boxes, it’s plotting people along a spectrum of faithfulness. There are the openly unfaithful and the steadily loyal, but God gives much attention on the vast territory between them: those who half-remember, who are grateful then forgetful, who are loyal under ease and treacherous under pressure, who keep the form of the bond while hollowing out its substance. The hypocrite or pretender, the munāfiq, is the sharpest illustration: a person who is inside by every outward measure and outside in the only measure that counts. The category exists to register the gap between proximity to the Covenant and mere proximity to the covenantal community.
This is existential in the strict sense: it concerns the standing of a person before the reality that addresses them. It needs no court, no border, no enforcement. It needs only a soul and a bond, which is to say it’s fully operative in every place and time, including ours.
A good example of this is in the prophetic statement: “Do not revert to kuffār after me, killing one another.” (al-Bukhārī and Muslim) The hadith speaks to the existential because “reverting to kuffār” names a state of betrayal, not a change of affiliation. The act is internal, fratricidal bloodshed which is exactly the term singled out in 2:84-85, where the Israelite covenantal community were bound by a pledge (mīthāq) not to shed each other’s blood or drive one another from their homes. In 2:85 God calls them out for doing it while still professing faithfulness, and gives the betrayal its description: “do you keep faith with parts of the Covenantal Book and ‘cover over’ parts? The unfaithfulness is not a doctrine denied but a covenant term broken: the kufr is the act of killing one’s own covenantal comrades, and it is reckoned existentially upon people who remain, by every outward measure, inside the community. The prophetic statement transposes that template directly onto the Ishmaelites (Muhājirūn) and their Joktanite allies (Ansār): Do not become, after me, the kind of people 2:84–85 describes: submitted, professing, formally within the bond, yet selectively faithful, keeping the parts of the Covenant that cost nothing and shedding one another’s blood in defiance of the one that defines it. To “revert to kuffār” is therefore not for a court to declare them outside a polity, nor for them to abandon a “religion” – it’s where the act of fratricide itself slides them into unfaithfulness towards the Covenant one is still standing within. This is the only sense of kufr that can be incurred by someone claiming faithfulness killing another one of the faithful, and the precise sense the Proclamation already established in the case of those before them.
How a Polity Sorts a Population
Despite popular Muslim narratives, none of this is relevant to takfīr which is the political act of declaring a particular person a kāfir. The Proclamation in its earliest Makkan register doesn’t engage in it. There the address is to the Ishmaelites, summoning them to honour the covenant they inherit from their forefather Abraham, and warning of the consequences of betraying it. There is no community with a boundary to police because there is no community in the political sense at all. The question is purely the existential one.
Takfīr only becomes intelligible later, and it becomes intelligible only as a political act. As the Madinan order developed, the Covenant Code was no longer simply proclaimed, it was politically instituted. It acquired a legal body: a community with laws, treaties, obligations, defence, and a perimeter. The moment a covenant is politically enforced, a second and quite different question is forced into existence alongside the first. It’s no longer only “are you faithful to the bond?” but “do you belong to this order, or do you stand with those arrayed against it?” That’s not a question about the interior of a soul but one about allegiance, and a polity can’t exactly avoid asking it because a polity must know who is inside its protection and who isn’t.
This is the decisive shift where the existential question admits a spectrum but the political question collapses into a binary because membership does. You can’t half-belong to a defended community in a time of conflict: either you’re within its covenant or you’re among the pagans who reject it. So the same vocabulary (īmān, kufr) gets pressed into service for a job it wasn’t built for. What had named a disposition now names a side in a contest.
The way God deals with this is simple. In 49:14-15, God states:
The desert Arabs (a’rāb) say, ‘We are faithful (ā’mannā).’ Tell them, ‘You aren’t faithful, so instead claim that you have merely submitted (aslamnā) for faithfulness (īmān) hasn’t yet entered your hearts’…The ‘faithful’ are the ones who have kept faith with God and His Messenger and do not waver, the ones who strive extraordinarily with their wealth and their lives in God’s way: they are the ones with integrity.
The distinction the passage draws is exactly the one between the two registers. “We have submitted” (aslamnā) is a verb of yielding, of coming under an order and accepting its terms – its root carries the sense of entering into peace or safety (silm) by surrendering to a settlement, which is precisely what these desert Arabs had done in relation to the newly instituted Madinan polity. They had come within the Covenant Code as a politically enforced order: complying with its law, its obligations, its authority, and receiving its protection, and that outward incorporation a state of having submitted, of membership in the political community, and not a movement of the heart. God refuses to let them call this īmān because faithfulness is the uncoerced, independent interior loyalty and allegiance to God’s will that no polity can compel, no social or ethnic group can oblige, and no compliance can counterfeit, and that, God says plainly, has not yet entered them. The definition that follows confirms it: the truly faithful are those who kept faith and did not waver, who staked their wealth and their lives – loyalty proven precisely where the enforced order can’t reach, under cost, by choice. Submission can be administered from outside as politic, social pressure, or economic need, but faithfulness can only be given from within.
History only deepened the drift. The “ridda” confrontations after the Prophet’s death are the clearest case: the ridda (reversion) was a political secession, tribes withholding allegiance and obligation from Madinah, and it was answered as a political matter, as a question of holding the political order together, not of auditing private convictions. As the conquests turned the community into an empire, kufr increasingly became a category of statecraft: a marker for managing populations, drawing the line between the abode of the covenant and the abode of war, regulating treaty, tribute, and protection. The existential weight of the word thinned as its administrative usefulness grew.
The Khārijites politically weaponised kufr by expelling fellow imperial citizens from the political community (takfīr) and positioning them as the state’s enemies, and their theology was inseparable from their insurrection. That is the recurring pattern wherever takfīrhas subsequently flourished. It is the political register turning on itself, a community using the language of faithfulness to expel rivals, justify rebellion, and license violence. Takfīr is not the existential question intensified. It is a political question detached from any restraint, an instrument for redrawing a political boundary by force.
The Phantom Limb in the West
This is why the concept of takfīr is not merely unhelpful in the West, but incoherent here. Takfīr is a juridical-political act and presupposes a body politic constituted by the Covenant Code, with a boundary that a recognised authority is entitled to police. That body doesn’t exist in the West. There is no covenant-polity, no perimeter, no enforced order – only autonomous individuals and voluntary associations living within secular states.
Any conversation about īmān or kufr is, by its very nature, existential. It asks where a person stands in relation to the Covenant (whether they keep faith with it or cover it over) and that is a question of orientation. To invoke the concept of takfīr in the middle of such a conversation is the invocation of a phantom limb: a gesture that still moves as though attached to a body that is no longer there. You can’t expel anyone from a polity that doesn’t exist. If the anxiety beneath the gesture is really about expelling someone from a minority identity, it is more misplaced still. A politicised ethnoreligious minority identity has nothing to do with the Covenant Code. Our discussions of kufr are Covenant-Code discussions, they concern faithfulness to a binding relationship, so they bear on no one’s inclusion in, or exclusion from, a communal census category. The two operate on entirely different planes: one weighs loyalty to God, the other tracks belonging to an ethnic demographic. Conflating them yields the worst of both: covenantal language turned into an instrument of communal gatekeeping, and communal grievance dressed up as theology.
The same dissolution overtakes the word muslim itself. In 49:14-15 the agent participle muslim describes a state of having submitted (aslamnā), of coming within the Covenant Code as a politically enforced order, with the outward incorporation the verse is careful not to mistake for faithfulness. In the West there is no such settlement to enter and no enforced order to come within, so that sense of the word simply loses its referent. What’s left is the description of ‘the submitted’ (in Arabic, muslim) in one register only: the orientation of a person who adheres to and upholds the Covenant Code – in the dispositional, existential sense, not the political one.
This is why the Anglicised label ‘Muslim’ and the Arabic Proclmation’s muslim are not the same word doing the same work. They are near-homophones pulling in opposite directions. The former is an Anglicised ethnoreligious minority identity, functioning much as the label “Jew” does: a matter of heritage, community, and census, the kind of belonging a liberal order protects. The latter is a generic Arabic word but in the context of the Proclamation, “the Abrahamic submitted,” names a covenantal orientation, and in its proper sense it goes largely unclaimed among us: the participle is alive on every form and survey, but dormant in the one register that gave it meaning. The confusion is almost built into the shared word!
From this the rest follows. Minority identity rights have little to do with the social and political duties of the faithful, because they answer to different things entirely. One appeals to the protections a plural society owes its communities, the other to the obligations a person owes the Covenant. I’m not problematising minority rights for ethnic groups, it can be useful in a liberal setting. The error is the co-optation where people fold what it means to be faithful in the Abrahamic sense into the parsing of identity, as though loyalty to God were a cultural inheritance to be administered, and as though defending an ethnic group is the same as upholding the bond. It is not. The duties of the faithful are not the entitlements of a minority, and no amount of shared spelling will make them so.
In our context, the only relevant conversation is the existential one – placing dispositions on the spectrum God draws: īmān is faithful loyalty to the Covenant, kufr is its betrayal. Likewise, an existential conversation draws on islām as Abrahamic submission to God defined as setting God’s order right, and kufr in contrast as corrupting God’s order, or indifference towards such corruption.
Clearly, this isn’t a court issuing verdicts on citizens, it’s a community discerning faithfulness, which is exactly the discernment the Proclamation models on every page. Here a second confusion has become almost reflexive, the mirror image of the first. Someone makes an existential observation, that a given posture breaks faith with the Covenant, and is met at once with the Muslim-speak: “You can’t make takfir!”. But no takfīr was actually made – we are not in a context where the act can be defined as such. To answer an existential discrimination with the prohibition of a political act is a plain non-sequitur: it refuses a question nobody asked while suppressing the one that was. The takfīr-monger imports a political tool where there is no body to use it on and his opponent forbids the existential question by misreading it as that same tool. Both have collapsed the two registers, in opposite directions, and between them they shut down the only conversation that was ever going to matter.
And it matters more, not less, for the absence of a polity because the existential question is generative in a way the political one can never be. It’s what gathers a people in the first place. A community is not founded by drawing borders and pronouncing on who falls outside them, it’s founded by a shared grip on “the firmest handhold” (2:256): a faithfulness to the Covenant, held in common, that doesn’t give way. That grip is what makes a body of people cohesive, and cohesion is what makes them effectual. Polity, if it comes at all, comes downstream of this: it is the late institutional expression of a faithfulness that was already binding people together long before it had anything to enforce. This is the order the early community actually followed, and it is exactly the order the Western conversation has inverted, reaching for the political instrument while neglecting, and even forbidding, the existential covenant and its bond that alone could give a community any substance to begin with.
The existential register suffers from none of the incoherence particularly because it doesn’t intrinsically need a polity to exist. It asks only the original question: “Are you faithful to God’s covenant, do you keep loyalty with what you know you owe?” and that question is as alive in London as it ever was in Makkah 1400 years ago. It is to return īmān and kufr to the work the Proclamation actually gives them: not the policing of a border, but the weighing of a conscience, and the gathering of the truly faithful into a people whose hold does not break.
