we have already drawn attention to elsewhere.

When these men observed how the mission of the messengers—Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon them all)—had dazzled the world, and when they acknowledged that the sacred law revealed to Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) is the greatest code ever to reach humankind, and when they saw that the prophets speak of angels and jinn, they sought to fuse all of that with the doctrines of their Greek forebears. Yet those Greeks were the farthest of all peoples from any real knowledge of Allah, His angels, His scriptures, His messengers, and the Last Day.

The Greeks had posited ten “intellects,” which they termed the disembodied or the separate substances. The idea grew out of the soul’s separation from the body, so they named those entities “separates” because they are detached from matter and stripped of it. They also affirmed the celestial spheres and ascribed to each sphere a soul; most of them deemed those souls to be accidents, while a few counted them as substances.

[The Alleged Properties of Prophethood According to Ibn Sīnā and the Other Philosophers]

As for the immaterial entities they asserted, close analysis shows that they reduce to notions that exist only in minds, not in external reality—just as the followers of Pythagoras posited abstract numbers and the disciples of Plato postulated the Platonic Forms. They likewise affirmed prime matter devoid of form and abstract duration and void. Their sharpest thinkers have conceded that such things are realised solely in the intellect, not in the real world. So when the later members of this school, like Ibn Sīnā, set out to establish the reality of prophethood