and among those who have no followers or disciples. He and his companions possessed power and political ascendancy, knowledge, eloquence, and clarity of expression. They even drew into their ranks people in authority, judges, shaykhs, and ordinary people in such numbers that their involvement would have diminished Islam and reduced it to something worse than the religion of the Christians and polytheists, had Allah not graciously granted Islam victory over them, exposed the corruption of their claims, established the proof against them, and uncovered the true nature of the deception in their statements—a deception concealing unbelief and heresy that only a select few of His servants can comprehend.

The point here is that those who deny both Allah’s separateness from the world and His indwelling within it—the speculative theologians among the philosophers, Mu‘tazilites, and Ash‘arites, such as Ibn Sīnā, al-Rāzī, Abū Hāmid, and their like—cannot, when they seek to do so, refute the advocates of indwelling with a rational argument that invalidates their doctrine, as explained above. Rather, their acceptance of the possibility of a being existing neither inside the world nor outside it necessarily entails accepting the possibility of the advocates’ doctrine. Thus, among these deniers you will find no one who offers a sound refutation of the advocates of indwelling. If he does not agree with them, his position in relation to them is that of an effeminate man, like a Rāfidī in relation to a Nāsibī. The Rāfidī cannot establish a proof against the Nāsibī who openly declares ‘Alī an unbeliever or a transgressor. For if the Nāsibī asks the Rāfidī:

“How did you know that ‘Alī was a believer, a friend of Allah, and destined for Paradise before establishing his imamate? This can be known only through transmitted reports, and such reports are either mass-transmitted or non-mass-transmitted.”

If the Rāfidī replies to him:

“Through the mass-transmitted accounts of his acceptance of Islam, his religious devotion, his jihad, his prayers, and his other acts of worship.”