—among these false premises are:
- Affirming the existence of the “Active Intellect.”
- Their claim that nothing brings events into being except the motion of the celestial sphere.
- Their assertion that the entity which sets the sphere in motion is the soul.
- Their notion that our souls are connected to that soul.
The point here is that, even if all this were true, it could yield knowledge only of future events for which the present celestial motion is the cause. As for occurrences that took place hundreds or even thousands of years earlier, no motion of the heavens at the time of the Prophet’s commissioning could have been their cause. The motion observable in his own era could only affect the future, not the past. Consequently, the soul’s setting the sphere in motion could never account for knowledge of such bygone matters, nor could that soul be the Preserved Tablet. Rather, the Glorious Qur’an itself is in a Preserved Tablet; it is in the Mother of the Book—“in a guarded Book, which none touch save those who have been purified” (al-Wāqiʿah 78–79)—and Allah, exalted is He, has declared: “The Trustworthy Spirit has brought it down” (al-Shuʿarāʾ 193).