Mishkāt al-Anwār itself alludes to this corrupt principle, and on that basis Ibn Qasī composed his treatise Khalʿ al-Naʿlayn. In it he asserted that the inspirations he received were “Hebraic in origin,” meaning that he resembled Moses son of ʿImrān: having cast off both this world and the next, he was visited—as he claimed—by divine addresses.

Because of such statements, people leveled grave criticisms against the author of Mishkāt al-Anwār. The philosophers appropriated him on the strength of that book and others like it, whereas his partisans insist that he later retracted all of this, as he himself notes elsewhere. Others maintain that these works are falsely attributed to him and are not his words at all. Similar passages in the Iḥyāʾ and other writings have also been condemned, as was done by the followers of Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī and those of Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī—such as Abū al-Ḥasan al-Marghīnānī and others—as well as by his associate Abū Bakr Ibn ʿArabī. Our own teacher Abū Ḥāmid remarked, “He went into the belly of the philosophers and then tried to come out, but was unable.” The same verdict was voiced by Abū Bakr al-Fihrī al-Ṭurṭūshī, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Māzarī, Abū al-Wafāʾ Ibn ʿAqīl, Abū al-Bayān al-Dimashqī, Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad Ibn Ḥamdīn al-Qurṭubī, Abū Muḥammad al-Maqdisī, Abū ʿAmr Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ, and many others besides.

The point here is this: those who claim that God’s address to Moses was nothing more than an effusion upon him—some of them even contend that the speech directed to them surpasses that directed to Moses. In our own time there have been people who say that Moses was spoken to from behind the veil of letters and sounds, whereas they are addressed without that veil. What they really mean is that the letters and sounds they “hear” are within themselves; it is those imagined voices that they are hearing.