﴿ وَلَا يَأْمُرَكُمْ أَن تَتَّخِذُوا۟ ٱلْمَلَٰٓئِكَةَ وَٱلنَّبِيِّۦنَ أَرْبَابًا ۗ أَيَأْمُرُكُم بِٱلْكُفْرِ بَعْدَ إِذْ أَنتُم مُّسْلِمُونَ ﴾

“And neither did he bid you to take the angels and the prophets for your lords: [for] would he bid you to deny the truth after you have surrendered yourselves unto God?”

Those who buy the world in exchange for the Hereafter do not deny religion or the Hereafter outright. Rather, they fully associate themselves with their religion. Then how do they reconcile these two conflicting spheres? This is done in a devious way, that is, by putting a self-styled construction upon revealed teachings. Aspirants to material honour and glory pervert the teachings of their religion in order to justify their worldly ways, sometimes by altering the wordings of revelations and sometimes by a wilful misinterpretation supportive of their selfish interests. Instead of changing themselves, they change the book of God, so that whatever it takes to give a religious aura to their irreligious lives may be shown to be contained therein. The most heinous crime in the eyes of God is to attribute to God something which He has not said. The simplest and most certain testimony of the truth of any teaching is that it brings God’s servants closer to their Lord, that it directs people’s feelings of love and fear towards God. On the contrary, any teaching which produces a personal cult or any other cult for that matter, or which diverts peoples’ finer feelings and emotions towards anything other than God, should be considered based on falsehood, even if it be couched in religious terms.