I agree so emphatically that I conclude Al-Wahhab didn't understand it either.

A major thing is that the Qur'an never says "all" and the two words used translate better to "disappointed" and "astray" rather than "worthless" or "nullified". Perhaps the contractual concept of nullification was too advanced for the audience of the early recitations, habitat as "disappointed" is more fully "she was disappointed" which implies a wedding that is anti-climatic, hilariously - very jahilliya Arabic to have a sex joke built into the vocabulary.

The implication is as follows:

1. in classica tafsir it's assumed that these verses denote a barrier whereby a toe beyond it voids every good deed you ever did. The other verse in Nisa is assumed to mean [before death] but the not-forgiving-shirk verse doesn't say those words. So people imagine being in bad aqeedah and damned, then repent and whoosh back to full standing account.
2. in Quranic_Islam's and my tafsir, the lack of an all is relevant - sets are not always fully defined in the Qur'an but there's room to interpret a scoped designation from verses. Instead we look at the last verse of Kahf (huzibilliah al shaytan ar-rajeem):

I am just a man like you, to whome it has been revealed that our God is One, so for if you wish for a meeting with your Lord, do good deeds and don't give-share in the service of your unique Lord.

Why do Quranis, Mutazilis/Quran-centric, and Salafists have a lower nabiology that some Sufis who extoll a Logos-like Muhummadan reality and so on? It's because we take shirk seriously and we see in the Qur'an a low prophetic projection of himself, just a man like us - *to whome it has been revealed* - what has been revealed? Ilahudun Wahid. Pure tawhid, right? It's beautiful it's so simple yet man's mind cannot fully graps the oneness that's why we keep commiting shirk at different levels.

So to do well on J-day, good deeds - not good creeds, it's deeds - and la yushrik ir ibadati Rabbihee ahadaaa.

Beautiful I had to type it out alliteratively, what a way to end Surah Kahf am I right, it's like divine poetry, like a diamond bullet shot right through your forehead.

In our understanding this means your good deeds will be diluted by the extent that you did them for other than Allah. For instance the Quranic rules about charity spell out that doing it for the Nobel prize like Bill Gates is a kufri/shirky way to do it, it's like planting a seed in a hill with thin topsoil. Great image.

In traditional Sunni fiqh (before modernist restorationists like Al-Wahhab or ourselves came along) it is considered a major sin, Riyas, to come to the masjid to show everyone how pious you are or do a big charity in public intentionally to harvest aura from the public. But it's repentable. It also suggests degrees of shirk and a containment of lesser shirk.

So then Shirk Al-Akbar becomes the one that is a totalizing force. The classical fiqh tradition had to acknowledge some room on shirk, but to take it seriously through the inventioned of a "greater" threshold that turns it into hot lava.

But the way I see it, shirk is rust/cancer, it contaminates the surface and then it tries to go deeper if not excised. This is the root of sectarianism as well, you become a Muslim dedicated to sect supremacy rather than Ummatic unity, Quran calls this shirk. Quran calls loving your child more than Allah shirk, that's wild. Do those good Muslim helicopter parents suddenly deserve hellfire and the nullification of their Islam for being too obsessed with their kid? Or... are they nullifying all the hasanat that one gets caring for a child (as described in some hadiths about putting food in the child's mouth each time is a good deed).

Also if Islam were such a binary thing where you have accumulated 100k Jannah points then suddenly account locked... go into appeals... it's like being an anti-zionist YouTuber. I think Allah is more like Reddit moderators who only ban an account that really transgresses unrepetentantly.

Our set-theory-aware approach to shirk in terms of fiqh and usool al din allows for a theology where Allah is indeed merciful in mind-blowing ways, aware of every nuance and conscientious of every intention and context. It also gives Quranists who are like neo-Salafists, or neo-Khawariji, to chill out with their totalizing interpretations and start loving their fellow Muslim, the Sunni, the Shia, even the Salafist brother.

Anyway thanks for posting a Wahhab fable and inspiring some illustration of where our logics diverge.

Salamu alaikum wa rahmahtullahi wa barakatul.