his mission. This is one of their most grievous errors, for no one equals Muhammad in his walāyah—neither Abraham nor Moses, let alone these godless innovators.

Every messenger is both prophet and saint. A messenger’s mission encloses his prophethood, and his prophethood encloses his walāyah. To imagine that Allah might inform him of revelation while withholding from him the rank of walāyah is impossible, for at the very moment Allah confers revelation on him he must necessarily be a saint of Allah; the two can never be separated. Even were such a separation conceivable, no one would still rival the Messenger in his walāyah.

Their Claim that the Source of Prophets and Saints Is One

These people further say—as Ibn ʿArabī, the author of al-Fuṣūṣ, maintains—that they draw from the same mine from which the angel who conveys revelation to the Messenger draws. In truth, they have embraced the creed of the philosophers and then recast it in the guise of mystical unveiling.

Those philosophers held that the celestial spheres are eternal without beginning, each possessing a cause resembling itself. Aristotle and his followers, and later figures such as Ibn Sīnā, claimed that the First Cause produces all things by sheer necessity. They did not affirm a Lord who created the heavens and the earth and everything between them in six days, who brings things into existence by His will and power, and who knows particulars. Some of them denied His knowledge altogether, like Aristotle, while others said that regarding changing phenomena He knows only their universals, as Ibn Sīnā alleges.