so it has not been abrogated.

What is astonishing, however, is that some of those who reject debating the unbelievers—on the grounds that the proofs of prophethood are already manifest—are themselves, along with the senior scholars they venerate and on whose reasoning and disputations they rely in matters of doctrine, the very people who claim to have established those proofs. In reality they have posed nearly eighty objections, doubts, and criticisms against the evidences of prophethood and then replied to them with answers that would not suffice even in matters that rest on likelihood; their replies are closer to reinforcing the objectors’ misgivings than to laying down the fundamentals of the religion.

Al-Ghazālī and others have likened such people to a man who strikes a tree so violently that he shakes it to its roots while insisting that he only wishes to make it stand firm. Many of the leading figures among them are themselves unsettled in their belief in prophethood—an instability whose full discussion is not our concern here—and yet, despite all that, they still claim