Sab‘īn and others like these two combined the two approaches. They thus came to regard the perfection of the soul as knowledge of absolute existence, and held that Allah is absolute existence. From the Sufi approach they took the view that it consists in knowledge of Allah, and from the discourse of these philosophers they took the view that it consists in knowledge of absolute existence. Combining the two, they said that Allah is absolute existence.

[The Third Ground]

As for the third premise, it is their claim that they have attained knowledge of being.

This is false. Their discourse on divine matters, scant though it is, contains more error than guidance and more ignorance than knowledge. Yet these are the sciences whose objects of knowledge, according to them, endure and through which souls attain perfection.

These matters have been discussed at length elsewhere, but we have drawn attention to them here because people such as this al-Āmidī and others like him extolled these philosophers’ approach and prefaced the books they wrote on what they claimed to be the foundations of the religion of Islam with the fundamental principle of these ignorant people: that the human soul attains perfection by acquiring the perfections proper to it, namely, a comprehensive grasp of intelligible things and knowledge of what is unknown. By following their paths, they fell into ignorance, perplexity, and doubt concerning that without which salvation cannot be attained and without knowledge of which felicity cannot be achieved—let alone the perfection that lies beyond that.

For the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:

“Many men have attained perfection.”

Thus, the men who have attained perfection