Exposing the Ultimate Aim of the Philosopher-Mystics: to Undermine the Fundamentals of Faith and the Majesty of the Creator

The upshot of their doctrine is the denial of the very pillars of faith: belief in Allah, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the Last Day.

At bottom they repudiate the Creator Himself, for they equate the existence of the created with the existence of the Creator.

A Critique of ḥulūl (indwelling) and waḥdat al-wujūd (the unity of being)

They claim, “Existence is one,” yet they fail to distinguish between what is numerically one and what is generically one. All beings share the label “existence,” just as individual human beings share the label “man” and animals share the label “animal.”

However, such a universal exists only in the mind. The animality inherent in this particular man is not the animality inherent in a horse, and the existence of the heavens is not, in itself, the existence of a human being. By the same token, the existence of the Creator—glorified and exalted be He—is not like the existence of His creatures.

In essence their statement echoes that of Pharaoh, who dismissed the Maker. Pharaoh did not deny the tangible, observable reality; he merely claimed that it exists of itself, without a Maker. These people agree with him on that point, yet go further by asserting that this self-subsisting being is Allah. They are therefore even more misguided than he was, although his explicit words are more blatantly false than theirs. On this basis they insist that the idol-worshippers in fact worshipped none but Allah.

They say: Because Pharaoh occupied the seat of absolute authority and wielded the sword—an office that, in common parlance, is accepted as law—he therefore proclaimed, “I am your Supreme Lord,” meaning: although all of you are lords in some relative sense, I am higher than you by virtue of the manifest power that has been granted me over you.