that temporal events must be finite, as opposed to those who maintain that they cannot be finite, and many more such disagreements besides.

Rather, sound rational propositions are those intelligible to sound innate faculties that perceive correctly and whose perception has not been corrupted. Such faculties continue to exist among human beings; the corruption of one group’s judgment does not entail the corruption of another’s.

But when people disagree and each group claims that its position is supported by sound innate faculties, their dispute can be settled only by something whose testimony they agree is true: either a Book sent down from heaven to judge between them, or the testimony of innate faculties that both groups acknowledge to perceive correctly and report truthfully. Disputants can be judged only by an arbiter whose judgment both accept.

The point here is that no reasonable person would say that everything called rational may be accepted, let alone that it must be accepted, still less that it may be used to oppose another rational proposition, or, beyond that, a Book revealed by Allah.

Accordingly, rejecting much of what is called rational does not amount to rejecting all of it. If one rejects a supposedly rational proposition upon which knowledge of the truth of revelation does not depend, this does not amount to rejecting the rational foundation through which revelation is known to be true. This is the point to be established.

Thus, the rational argument at issue here, which they have used to oppose the divine verses and prophetic hadiths, consists of what they have advanced to deny that Allah is above His creation. None of this is needed to know that revelation is true. For the affirmation of the existence of a being that cannot be pointed to and is neither within the world nor outside it,