and likewise, those who say that the speaker’s intent cannot be known through scriptural evidence—as al-Rāzī and his followers maintain when they claim that scriptural evidence does not yield certainty about the speaker’s intent—have no evidence from revelation that yields knowledge of what the Messenger reported. How, then, can they set it against that rational argument?

Likewise, anyone who knows that the rational arguments they use to oppose revelation are false cannot use them to oppose evidence he considers probable, let alone evidence he considers certain. Thus, those who have explicitly given rational evidence unconditional precedence over scriptural evidence, such as Abū Hāmid, al-Rāzī, and their followers, cannot acquire knowledge from the prophets concerning what they reported if they do not acknowledge that the Messenger conveyed the message clearly and without error.

Rather, their belief in prophethood is tainted by doubt: either because they allow that he might say something contrary to what he knows, as Ibn Sīnā and others like him maintain; or because they allow that he might lack knowledge of the matter, as another group maintains; or because they regard prophethood as a possibility—they have not yet become certain that the Prophet is protected from error in what he says and that he conveyed the message clearly.

You will therefore find no one who gives reason unconditional precedence over the Messenger’s report without his heart harboring a sickness in his faith in the Messenger. Such a person first needs to know that Muhammad is Allah’s Messenger, truthful and confirmed as truthful, who says nothing about Allah but the truth; that he conveyed the message clearly; and that he is protected from Allah allowing him to persist in any error in what he conveyed and reported