What confirms this is that the great majority of those nations openly acknowledge the existence of spirits distinct from human beings—namely angels and jinn. The polytheists among the Arabs, Indians, Turks, Nabateans, and others, together with their practitioners of magic and soothsaying, all affirm the reality of the jinn: they converse with them, invoke them, and adjure them by oaths. The same applies to the star-worshippers who call upon the sun, moon, and stars, worship and prostrate to them, as Nimrod son of Canaan and his people once did, and as the idolaters of India, Turkey, Arabia, Persia, and other lands still do.

Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn al-Khaṭīb al-Rāzī, in his treatise on this subject, has recorded at length many details about such people. Reports to this effect are mass-transmitted: it is well attested that one of them may be accompanied by separate entities that fulfill many of his needs, entities they call “the planetary spirits.” Thus these idolaters and Sabaeans—among the various nations, philosophers, and others—freely admit the existence of independent jinn, their influence in the world, their transmission of information, and other such matters.

It therefore becomes clear that those philosophers who claim that the causes—