about Himself, nor about the Last Day; rather, they repudiate the very reality of both.
Their doctrine regarding what Allah has conveyed about Himself and about the Hereafter is that all of it is mere imagery with no actual substance.
As for the divine commands and prohibitions, many of them assign to the obligations and forbidden acts esoteric interpretations that clash with what Muslims universally understand. They claim that the prescribed prayers are really a knowledge of their own secrets, that fasting means concealing those secrets, and that pilgrimage is nothing but traveling to visit their shaykhs—and so forth. Such claims are, by the clear and indisputable teachings of Islam, falsehood, fabrication, disbelief, and deviance.
They also say that the sacred laws bind the common people but not the elite. When, in their estimation, a person reaches the rank of the gnostics and the “verifiers,” all legal duties are lifted from him: the obligations fall away and the prohibitions become lawful.
Some who affiliate themselves with Sufism and spiritual discipline may adopt elements of these ideas.
These Bāṭinīs are the outright atheists concerning whom the Muslims unanimously agree that they are more disbelieving than the Jews and Christians, because of the severity of their impiety and their rejection of every divine law.

Second example: the spirit that brings life. It is closer to a person than anything else—in fact, it is the very essence of the human being. The revealed texts describe it as being taken from the body, taken up to the heavens, and then returned to the body, and no one denies its real existence.
People, however, have been unable to grasp its true nature except for what they have learned through revelation, and they have differed greatly about it because they have no observable counterpart to compare it with:
– Among them are groups of scholastic theologians who identified it as the body itself, or a part of the body, or merely an attribute