Likewise, Christians revere things of this kind. The same is true of the philosophers: when one of them hears his authorities speak of essential and accidental attributes, constitutive and divisive attributes, matter and hyle, composition from quantity and quality, and other such expressions, he reveres them before grasping their meanings. Then, when he seeks to understand them, in many cases he has nothing to rely on but blindly following those authorities.

For this reason, their discourse contains as much falsehood mixed with truth as Allah wills. They call these matters rational teachings, whereas for them they are merely teachings accepted on authority: they have blindly followed people whom they know are not protected from error. When their unsoundness is explained to one of them, he has no answer to it. Instead, his unqualified veneration for the leading proponents of that doctrine rejects and then contests what has become clear to his own reason. He says:

“How could anyone suppose that something like this would escape Aristotle, Ibn Sīnā, Abū al-Hudhayl, Abū ‘Alī al-Jubbā’ī, or others like them? Or that they would say such a thing?”

Yet he considers that those who have followed the one protected from error, who does not speak from his own desire—

“It is nothing but a revelation revealed.”
[al-Najm: 4]

—have deprived themselves of their share of reason, knowledge, and discernment, and have contented themselves with accepting a statement without knowing