of a sacred nature, through which he acquires knowledge without learning.

The second is that he possesses a power of the soul through which he influences the matter of the world.

The third is that, through imagination, he sees and hears within himself the realities represented to him. Thus, they maintain that the angels whom the prophets see, and the words they hear from them, exist only within their souls, not externally.

According to them, the Seal of the Saints receives pure intelligible realities that require no imaginative representation. Whoever holds this view says that he draws from the same source as the angel who conveys revelation to the Seal of the Prophets. For, in his view, the angel is the imagination within the prophet’s soul, while he himself draws from the source from which that imagination draws.

This and similar notions constitute the unveiling to which those who consider themselves independent of receiving knowledge through revelation resort. These are the people who have followed the approach indicated by the author of al-Ihyā’ (The Revival) and others like him, who followed the philosophers’ framework in certain matters.

The path of these philosophizers is worse than that of the Jews and Christians. Their approach has been discussed at length elsewhere.

The point here is that these people, despite their heresy, their refusal to follow the Messenger and receive guidance through him, and their effectively setting him aside, contradict themselves. Their discourse is inconsistent; whoever is turned away is diverted from it. Everyone who turns away from the divinely ordained path of the early generations, grounded in revelation, must inevitably go astray, contradict himself, and remain in either compound or simple ignorance.