speech and strange tongues that the person in question could never articulate on his own. It becomes clear that someone else is speaking through him—or has prompted him with those words—and that his soul did not produce them in isolation, without an external spirit acting upon it.

Such phenomena have been witnessed among depraved souls, and much of what they report is in fact transmitted to them by demonic spirits. All the more, then, must the reports delivered by the prophets come from the spirits of the angels.

The objectors claim: “For us, devils are merely the forces of an evil soul, whereas angels are the forces of a righteous soul.” We reply that the great majority of Muslims do not deny the existence of such faculties, as mentioned earlier. Yet the point here is to affirm the existence of entities distinct from those faculties—namely, the jinn who supply many soothsayers with a wealth of information. Anyone who has dealt with them directly, or who has heard about them from a source whose report yields certainty, knows this with absolute assurance; we ourselves have experienced it repeatedly.

This, therefore, is a form of unveiling and disclosure of the unseen that is not purely psychological. The third category—information imparted by angels—is the most exalted of all, as numerous textual and rational proofs attest.

Once it is established that knowledge of the unseen may arise from psychological causes, from malignant causes (demonic or otherwise), or from angelic causes, it becomes evident that what these people describe belongs to one of the first two categories and is the weakest of the three. Thus, the furthest extent of their belief in prophethood reduces the prophet to the level of a man no stronger than the feeblest of the righteous.