This is as far as Ibn Sīnā and philosophers like him go. Hence, in their view, human perfection consists in becoming an intelligible world corresponding to the existing world. They regard bliss and torment as two states inhering in the soul, among its accidents, with neither existing apart from it. Elsewhere, we have explained some of the errors in this position.

For this reason, in his logic he held that rational knowledge possessing certainty consists of these intelligibles. He denied that generally accepted practical propositions possess certainty, and likewise denied certainty to propositions establishing the existence of sensible beings absent from immediate perception. He called the latter judgments of the estimative faculty. By rejecting these, he rejected beings beyond the sensory perception of most people in this world. Thus, he did not affirm unseen beings, nor much of what is witnessed in this world, including angels, jinn, and other beings. By denying that generally accepted propositions possess certainty, he rejected the dictates of the soul’s practical faculty, through which it approves of actions beneficial to it and disapproves of those harmful to it. He thus excluded the actions without which the soul cannot attain perfection from the realm of certainty, just as he excluded them from perfection itself. He made the soul’s perfection consist solely in abstract knowledge, unaccompanied by any genuine love for Allah Most High. In their view, actions serve only to prepare the soul to attain the knowledge they imagine to constitute perfection.

Yet most of what they claim to be knowledge is ignorance, and whatever knowledge it contains is not knowledge