—chiefly those devout worshippers who at times receive angelic inspiration yet at other times suffer Satan’s whisper, convincing them that they are prophets. Such a person may declare, “Allah has sent me,” but sooner or later his lie is bound to be exposed, if only partially—for instance, when the devil reports something that is patently false. The very Satan who told him, “You are a prophet,” must inevitably lie in some of what he conveys.

Likewise, the truthful source will inform him that this claim is false. Therefore, whenever the devil brings him a lie, the truthful messenger who visits him must necessarily deliver something that contradicts it. This differs from reports about minor, incidental matters: claiming that he is a true prophet when he is not would doom him to utter ruin and would invalidate every benefit the truthful source might otherwise provide, because it obliges the man to believe that liar in everything he subsequently says. Once he has accepted that he himself is a prophet, the liar will no longer appear a liar to him, and he will not even realize he is being deceived.

He will thus be unlike Ibn Sayyad and others who are known to receive both truthful and false reports; rather, he is even more misguided, for he assumes that everything conveyed to him is true. Hence anyone who is visited by both accurate, angelic information and deceitful, Satanic information must inevitably recognize that a liar is also speaking to him, because the falsehood of what the lying devil reports becomes unmistakably clear, exactly as reality bears out.