—only for the peasants of Persia and Byzantium, the fledglings of the Jews and the philosophers, to clarify (1) for the ummah the sound creed that every legally accountable—or at least every virtuous—person is obliged to hold!

If the truth is what these dialectical theologians (2) claim—and if that is indeed the belief that must be held—and yet (3) they have been left to know it by nothing but their own unaided intellects, obliged by the dictates of those intellects to reject whatever the Book and the Sunnah establish explicitly or by their apparent sense, then leaving people with no Book and no Sunnah at all would, on this reckoning, have been more beneficial and more rightly guided for them! In fact, on such an assumption, the very existence of the Book and the Sunnah would be sheer harm at the very root of religion.

For (4) the upshot of the matter—as they put it—is this: “You servants of God, do not seek knowledge of Allah or of the attributes He deserves, whether in affirmation or negation, from the Book, the Sunnah, or the path of the early generations. Rather, consult your own minds: whatever attributes you judge Him worthy of, ascribe them to Him, whether or not they are found in the Book and the Sunnah; and whatever your minds do not judge Him worthy of, do not ascribe to Him.”

Yet even here they split into two camps. Most of them say, “Whatever your intellects do not affirm, negate it.” Others say, “No, withhold judgment about it.” And what your rational analogy negates—over which you differ and vacillate more ⦗33⦘ than in any other disagreement on the face of the earth—