he can know the unseen while awake just as he does in sleep. They maintained that the reason is that knowledge of events is engraved upon the Active Intellect, or the celestial soul; when the rational soul becomes attached to that realm, it perceives it. At times the imagination then casts this knowledge into a visible likeness, and at other times it does not.

The enabling cause of such attachment is a weakening of the soul’s link to the body. That weakening may arise from insanity or illness—such as afflicts people of a melancholic disposition; it may result from extreme hunger, exhaustion, or similar states; or it may be produced through spiritual discipline. These three conditions—prolonged fasting, physical fortitude, and being alerted by dreams and what resembles them—befall Muslim and unbeliever alike, the pious and the profligate, and they become the source of extraordinary phenomena and of the soul’s manipulation of the elements. For just as the soul acts upon its own body, moving it and transforming it from one state to another, so too may it act upon the elemental constituents of the world, which then serve as its body, bringing about earthquakes, sending down rain, and the like.

He concluded: when this faculty is innate to a person, and he is rightly guided and has purified his soul, what appears through him is a prophetic miracle or a saintly wonder; but if it occurs to him while he is wicked