sanctioned. There is no doubt that those who believed in Allah and His Messenger had sounder minds than the speculative theologians who followed this method.

As for the minds of the unbelievers, although believers generally have sounder minds, unbelievers may nevertheless possess enough discernment to keep them from saying what many adherents of religious innovations say.

Do you not see that most rational people among the unbelievers will not accept the lies of the Rāfidah? Likewise, the polytheists who lived in the Prophet’s time, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, would not have considered rejecting his message through arguments so subtle and obscure that most people cannot understand them. Rational people who do understand them recognize them as nonsense and falsehood.

All this becomes clear when you consider that the Arabs, despite their polytheism, acknowledged Allah as the Lord, Creator, and Sovereign of everything, and acknowledged divine decree. In this respect, their minds were sounder than those of people who maintain that many events were neither created, decreed, nor willed by Allah. The Arabs also acknowledged that Allah acts by choice: whatever He wills comes to pass, and whatever He does not will does not come to pass. Their minds were thus sounder than those of the Dahriyyah (eternalists) and philosophers who maintain that the world emanated from a sufficient cause that necessarily produces it, as the eternalists and metaphysicians assert.

There is no doubt that someone who denies the Creator and maintains that the world necessarily exists in itself has an even more unsound mind than these people.

The Arabs did not hold this view—unless, perhaps, isolated individuals among them professed it. But it was not prevalent among them. Rather, what prevailed was acknowledgment of the Creator and His knowledge, power, and will.

These specious arguments—the arguments of the Jahmiyyah—originally arose among the atheists of