what they have imagined as absolute existence.

They say, “Multiplicity and differentiation belong only to sense perception. Once the heart’s witnessing is cut off from the senses, no differentiation or multiplicity remains. At that point, they claim, sensory witnessing is in error, for it is the intellect, not the senses, that apprehends universals and absolutes. So when they invalidate what the senses attest, nothing is left to them but universal existence.

Then they go on to suppose that this is Allah Himself, so that the Lord, in their view, becomes no more than a notion and a fancy within their own souls, without any reality outside the mind—

just as one of their sharpest thinkers said, namely al-Tustarī, the companion of Ibn Sabʿīn:

“Your illusion is produced by giving concrete form to what lies beneath it…”