Then, when all this is dressed up in a profusion of lengthy, intricate terms unfamiliar to anyone outside their private vocabulary, it misleads the naïve just as a mirage beguiles the thirsty. Meanwhile, one whose faith and knowledge rest on the Book and the Sunnah only grows firmer, for an opposite sets off the beauty of its opposite: the more a person understands falsehood, the more he esteems the truth and recognizes its worth.

[The Condition of Those of Middle Rank among the Theologians]

As for the speculative theologian who has reached only the middle stage, he is exposed to dangers from which both the novice who never entered the field and the veteran who has traversed it to the end are relatively safe. The one who stayed outside remains unharmed; the one who completed the journey has discerned its limit and no longer fears anything else. If the truth then appears to him—and he is parched for it—he embraces it. The man in the middle, however, is still intoxicated by the doctrines he has absorbed, most of them accepted on authority and magnified in his imagination.

People say: The greatest sources of corruption in this world are half a theologian, half a jurist, half a physician, and half a grammarian. The first ruins religions, the second ruins lands, the third ruins bodies, and the fourth ruins tongues.

[The Theologians Are in Divergent Speech]

Whoever understands that the speculative theologians—among the Peripatetic philosophers and others—are, for the most part, “in contradictory speech; none but the deluded are turned away from it” (Surah adh-Dhāriyāt 51:8–9), will realize—even the keenest among them