and that nothing whatsoever can be learned from their reports about the attributes of God, or about the realities of the Hereafter. In truth, their position reduces to claiming that the prophets lied for the sake of expediency. Such people are regarded as atheistic unbelievers by the followers of the prophets among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Yet many of them are outwardly found among the adherents of the revealed religions—because those faiths are publicly recognized—while inwardly they hold this very opinion.

Those who limit the return to the soul alone are of several stripes. Some say that souls transmigrate—either into human bodies, into animal bodies in general, or into any place occupied by living bodies. Others restrict transmigration to the wretched souls only, while many of their more rigorous thinkers deny transmigration altogether.

The fourth position is to reject both kinds of return outright. This is the creed of the unbelievers among the Arabs, the Greeks, the Indians, the Turks, and others. The pseudo-philosophers who follow Aristotle—such as al-Fārābī and his followers—have three different views concerning the return of spirits:

1. that both the knowledgeable soul and the ignorant soul return;
2. that only the knowledgeable soul returns, while the ignorant soul does not; and
3. that both are denied any return. Al-Fārābī himself espoused all three views at different times.

A detailed treatment of these issues belongs elsewhere, for the present purpose