the philosophers as he understood them, in the book he called The Aims. He claimed that he had written this book only to refute them. He then composed his well-known work The Incoherence of the Philosophers, in which he declared them unbelievers on three issues, on the grounds that they had, as he claimed, violated consensus concerning them. He also pronounced them innovators on other issues. In it he presented arguments that sowed doubt and bewildering specious objections that led many people astray from both philosophy and the revealed Law.

He then stated in his well-known work The Jewels of the Quran that the arguments he had set out in The Incoherence were merely dialectical, and that he had set out the truth only in What Is Withheld from Those Unqualified for It. Then, in his well-known work The Niche of Lights, he described the ranks of those who know Allah. He stated that all of them were veiled except those who believed that Allah, glorified is He, is not the mover of the first heaven, but rather the One from whom this mover emanated. This is an explicit affirmation on his part of the philosophers’ doctrines concerning divine matters.

Yet he had said on more than one occasion that their teachings concerning divine matters were conjectures, unlike their other sciences. As for the book he called Deliverance from Error, in it he directed his attacks against