As for the second idol—namely their contention that, whenever reason and revelation seem to clash, reason must be preferred—he relied heavily for its demolition on the work of his teacher Ibn Taymiyyah, Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wa’l-naql (Averting the Conflict between Reason and Revelation). He made no secret of this debt; rather, he said: “Shaykh al-Islam has treated this subject so thoroughly that nothing can be added to it. He has exposed the falsity of this specious argument and shattered this idol in his great book. We shall therefore cite only a few words—no more than a drop from his ocean—that encompass its destruction and refutation, and this will become evident from several angles.” Accordingly, in the portion of the book now extant, he listed 242 such angles, which occupy nearly two-thirds of the surviving text.

Two points merit careful notice:

First: in the manuscript (q 54b) the numbering jumps directly from the forty-seventh angle to the fiftieth, omitting the forty-eighth and forty-ninth. Either those two angles have been lost, or the numbering itself is in error.

Second: in the manuscript (q 69b) the count moves straight from the seventy-second angle to the seventy-ninth, leaving out angles seventy-three through seventy-eight. The scribe noted in the margin, “Thus it is in the original.”

Consequently, the refutations of this idol that are actually available come to only 234 angles.

This, then, is the portion of the book that has reached us, while the parts devoted to smashing the third and fourth idols have yet to be discovered.