He said:

“As for the Ash‘arīs, they sought to reconcile the two beliefs: the denial of corporeality and the possibility of seeing what is not a body through sensory perception. This proved difficult for them, so they resorted to specious sophistical arguments—that is, arguments that appear to be sound but are false. For it seems that arguments exhibit the same distinctions found among people: just as some people possess virtue in its fullness, others possess a lesser degree of virtue, and still others appear virtuous without actually being so—these being mere pretenders—so too with arguments. Some attain the highest degree of certainty, others fall short of certainty, and others merely pretend to certainty: they appear certain but are false.

“The arguments the Ash‘arīs have pursued in this question include arguments intended to rebut the Mu‘tazilah’s proof, and others intended to establish the possibility of seeing what is not a body and to show that supposing such vision entails no impossibility.

“As for their counterarguments to the Mu‘tazilah’s statement that ‘everything seen lies in a direction relative to the viewer,’ some of them said that this judgment applies only to the observable, not to the unseen; that this is not one of those cases in which the judgment concerning the observable must be extended to the unseen; and that a person may see something that lies in no direction, since it is possible for a person to see through the visual faculty itself