For this reason the outcry against the author of The Alchemy of Happiness, the author of What Is Concealed from the Unworthy, and The Niche of Lights grew so great: in those works he had expressed ideas akin to the discourse of these irreligious philosophers, though he had wrapped them in Islamic terminology and Sufi hints. Because of that veneer, the writer of Khalaʿ al-Naʿlayn, Ibn Sabʿīn, Ibn ʿArabī, and others who built on that corrupt foundation were beguiled by it.

Yet prophethood can never be severed from a divinely sent revelation which Allah, by His will and power, grants exclusively to whomever He chooses among His servants. Exalted is He; He knows the prophet in question and knows what He sends down to him, and by His omnipotence He singles him out with the unique honors He bestows.

These heretics, however, claim that Allah’s address to Moses son of ʿImrān was nothing more than an inspiration or intuition that arose within Moses himself. According to them, any individual who undergoes spiritual discipline and purification may be addressed just as Moses was—indeed, even more—and may even hear the very same words Moses heard. So maintained the author of The Revival of the Religious Sciences in certain passages, although it is said that he later recanted.

Some of them go further still, asserting that the communication they receive is superior to what reached Moses and the other prophets. This is the doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī, author of the Meccan Revelations, and those like him who claim that what came to Moses and Muhammad only reached them through the inner faculty of imagination—which, in their view, is Gabriel—whereas what comes to Ibn ʿArabī is beyond that, for he