mastered their technical jargon, it casts the novice into the very illusion that a mirage casts upon the thirsty (1). Yet his faith and his knowledge of what the Qur’an and the Sunnah teach only grow. For an opposite displays the beauty of its opposite, and the more a person knows of falsehood, the more he venerates the truth and the better he recognizes it (2).

As for the student of kalām who has reached only the middle stage, he is exposed to a danger that does not threaten either the one who never stepped into the field or the one who has pursued it to the end. He who never entered it is safe, while the one who has taken it to its furthest limit has discovered its ultimate reach, so nothing else need alarm him (3). When the truth is made plain to him and he longs for it, he accepts it. The intermediate student, however, remains ensnared in the notions he has picked up from assorted doctrines, slavishly imitating the authority he reveres and overawed by grandiose rhetoric (4).

People have said: The things that spoil the world the most are half a dialectician, half a jurist, half a physician, and half a grammarian. The first corrupts religions, the second ruins countries, the third harms bodies, and the fourth mangles language.

Whoever realizes that the dialecticians—whether they belong to the philosophers (5) or to others—are, for the most part, mutually at variance (6), such that only those already diverted are led astray by them, knows—if he is intelligent and discerning—that he does not speak with clear insight, that his argument is anything but decisive, and that it is exactly as has been said about it: