are endless, and it is impossible to enumerate all the whisperings Satan casts into people’s souls. Had these two men—who were said to be among the foremost men of their age in rational inquiry, both in speculative theology and in philosophy—not each raised the objections I have mentioned and regarded them as invalidating the aforementioned method of establishing the Necessary Being, I would not have mentioned them. Their invalidity is evident to anyone who properly understands what they have said, let alone someone whose heart Allah has illuminated.

Moreover, these philosophers maintain, as al-Āmidī claimed, that the perfection of the human soul consists in comprehending intelligible things and knowing the unknown. Yet they have failed to know the Necessary Being. What, then, have they known?

[The ignorance and bewilderment of the innovators]

It has reached me through an unbroken chain of transmission that one of their leading figures, al-Khūnajī, the author of Kashf al-asrār (Unveiling the Secrets), a work on logic—whom many of them consider unsurpassed in this discipline—said as he was dying: “I am dying, and I have learned nothing except that the contingent depends on the Necessary Being.” Then he said: “Dependence is a negative attribute. I am dying, and I have learned nothing.”

A trustworthy informant related that this al-Āmidī said: “I have examined speculative theology in depth, yet gained nothing from it beyond what ordinary people already believe”—or words to that effect.