need for action ن and imagined that they had attained this, they supposed that they were exempt from the obligations binding on all and permitted to do what was forbidden to all.

[The invalidity of this view on several grounds, and its refutation]

Their error has several aspects.

One is their assumption that perfection consists in knowledge alone.

The second is their assumption that what they have attained is knowledge.

The third is their assumption that this knowledge is what perfects the soul.

The First Ground

Each of these premises is false. The soul’s perfection does not consist in knowledge alone, nor in its becoming an intelligible world corresponding to the existing world. Rather, it must also act—namely, love Allah and worship Him.

The soul has two faculties: one cognitive and the other practical. It cannot be sound unless both are sound ن that is, unless it knows Allah and worships Him.

The Jahmiyya are far better than these people. Yet when Jahm and those who agreed with him said that faith consists solely in knowledge, the leading authorities of Islam rejected this ن so much so that Wakīʿ ibn al-Jarrāh, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and others declared anyone who held this view a disbeliever.