The prophetic language of the Hadiths is consistently hyperbolic. We often find the phrase that someone who commits a certain sin or holds some incorrect belief ‘Is not from among us,’ for example. ‘Whoever carries arms against us is not from among us,’ the Prophet warns in one such Hadith. Does this mean that a person committing this act ceases to be a Muslim, leaving the faith for doing so? Recognizing the hyperbolic flair in the Prophet’s rhetoric, the medieval ulama understood this phrase as a type of preventative rebuke (zajr) and not a formal excommunication (takfir).
