their true religion and the innovations they have introduced into it, and to show that these principles are either false, or true but elaborated at a length that brings no benefit and may even cause harm. They have sought to prove the evident through the obscure, like someone who defines a thing by something less clear than itself.

Definitions and proofs are intended only to clarify and explain, and to indicate and guide. If, then, what is known and recognized through innate human nature is treated as obscure and proved through something even more obscure, or is rejected and its opposite and contrary are asserted, while the ways of the early generations and the imams are those indicated by the Book and Sunnah—the innate, rational, certain ways that accord with the divine texts—it becomes clear that anyone who opposes those scripturally grounded ways, in both their rational and transmitted aspects, with such innovated methods—indeed, abandons them for these methods—is in manifest error, as is indeed the case in reality.

Allah speaks the truth and guides to the way:

“And Allah invites to the Home of Peace and guides whom He wills to a straight path.”

As for the method of the Muʿtazilah’s leading scholars, which Abū al-Husayn mentioned and then abandoned, it is more remote and more protracted, and the objections to it are more numerous, as is plain. Nevertheless, these methods involve neither lying nor falsehood in the sense of reporting something contrary to what it actually is, or of presenting false propositions; rather, their fault lies in proving something through what is more obscure than it. This is unlike their statements about preference without a determining factor, coming into existence without a cause, and their rejection of an unending succession of events. For their opponents say: “Their statements on these matters