the Battīkhiyyah—a claim whose invalidity is self-evident to anyone who knows Islam.

As for faith in the messengers, these people maintain that the “Seal of the Saints” possesses a deeper knowledge of God than the Seal of the Prophets, and that the Seal of the Prophets—and all the other prophets—derive their knowledge of God from the niche of that “Seal of the Saints.” This flies in the face of both reason and religion; it is, as the saying goes, “The roof has collapsed on them from beneath—no reason, no Qur’an!” For it is plain to the intellect that the later figure learns from the earlier, not the reverse; and it is a matter of religion that the most distinguished saints take their knowledge from the prophets.

The foremost saints of this community are the righteous believers who kept company with the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, as the Exalted says: “If you two side together against him, then Allah is his Protector—and Gabriel—and the righteous believers” (Q 66:4). The best of those righteous believers are Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, by the unanimous agreement of the early and later scholars, though the Shiʿah give precedence to ʿAlī. All Muslims, however, concur that the greatest saint after the Messenger of Allah—whether one says it is Abū Bakr or ʿAlī—must be one of those two, even though some report differing views about other Companions.

Whoever, from among the errant Ṣūfīs, claims that someone of the later generations could surpass Abū Bakr and ʿUmar—as al-Tirmidhī al-Ḥakīm asserted in his book “The Seal of the Saints,” and as others followed him in saying—