and a fair law by which the populace profits, through which he urges them to live justly according to the measure of his knowledge—much as every people has had its own codifiers of law, the framers of statutes among the Greeks, the Indians, the Persians, and others.

If, moreover, that law-giver should be singled out with (1) a sacred faculty that lets him obtain knowledge with ease, (2) a psychic power by which he performs deeds outside the ordinary, and (3) an imaginative power that presents to him inner luminous forms and voices he alone hears, then these three properties are, according to Ibn Sīnā and other philosophers like him, the very hallmarks of a prophet. Whoever possesses them, they claim, is a prophet, and prophethood in their view is something that can be acquired.

Yet because many people share these abilities without drawing anywhere near the rank of the ṣiddīqs—the veracious followers of the prophets, such as the Rightly Guided Caliphs, Jesus’s disciples, and Moses’s companions—we have kept this type within the same second category; for its possessor may show a degree of justice and statesmanship commensurate with whatever knowledge and fairness he has. That, then, is the second category.

Otherwise, he is a mendacious, immoral, slanderous sinner who knowingly fabricates lies and wrongdoing, or he speaks without knowledge and thus errs like anyone who ventures speech without knowledge—one who mistakes falsehood for truth, deems the invalid valid, takes deviation for guidance, and waywardness