—then the remaining four are Empedocles, followed by Pythagoras, then Socrates, and finally Plato. These four travelled to al-Shām and acquired knowledge from the Children of Israel. For that reason none of them asserted that the universe is eternal—unlike Aristotle, they explain, because he never visited al-Shām. Writers such as Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-ʿĀmirī and others further state that the first person to be given the honorific “sage” was Luqman, and that Empedocles benefited from him as well as from the followers of David, peace be upon him—