part you have mentioned or left unmentioned, as it does for the human being himself.’”

[Ibn Taymiyyah’s Comment]

I say: One may respond to him as follows: By your statement, “People may be inclined to imagine that what exists is what is perceptible to the senses,” you may mean what a particular individual has perceived, what can be perceived in this world, or what can be perceived even after death.

As for the first meaning, no rational person maintains it. Every rational person knows things through the reports of others, or through his own examination and inference, that he has not learned through his senses. Whoever claims that al-Rāhima, or other peoples, restricted existing things to what is perceptible to the senses—meaning that a particular individual does not believe in anything he has not personally perceived, and does not accept mass-transmitted reports or other reports—has not understood their intent. Any people with a land in which they live must have individuals who distinguish their mothers from their fathers and know events in their land, the history of their kings, and their customs through reports alone. This is analogous to—through reports alone. This is analogous to the account given by those who claim that there is a people called the Sophists, named after a man called Sūfastā, who deny realities, deny their own knowledge of all realities, suspend judgment, or hold that realities are entirely determined by beliefs. It is inconceivable that any people who continue to live in this world could maintain such a position.

Rather, “sophistry” is an Arabized word whose original form is sūfasqiyā, a Greek word meaning wisdom disguised through sophistry—that is, false discourse made to resemble the truth. This affects many people, or most of them, in many matters, but not in all of them. For just as illnesses afflict