This course is the superior and more complete one: whoever takes the Messenger as the intermediary between himself and God in every matter is more perfect and more excellent than the person whose own heart serves as that intermediary—even when what his heart tells him from his Lord conforms to the Book and the Sunnah. The difference is like the merit of Abū Bakr over ʿUmar.

For this reason the finest of God’s friends are the Siddīqs, those who receive directly from the prophets, peace be upon them; the saints are mere followers of the prophets. Only the irreligious extremists among certain Ṣūfīs and the like place the saints on a par with the prophets, claiming for them a path to God other than the prophets’ path. The same is done by the unbelieving philosophers who equate philosophers with prophets and say, “The prophets and the sages agreed,” or “The prophets and the sages declared,” as appears in the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and similar writings. All of this stems from people who have not believed in the messengers and the prophets with the faith that is their due: they treat them as belonging to the same class as others in what they report and command, and they regard what the prophets bring as no different from what those they label “saints” and “sages” bring. This is built on the corrupt premise that prophethood consists merely of those three characteristics—traits that in fact occur in many ordinary individuals.

One of the clearest distinctions between the prophets and everyone else is that God, exalted be He, has made it obligatory to believe in whatever each and every prophet was given, without exception, as He says:

“Say: We believe in God and in what has been sent down to us, and in what was sent down to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob and the Tribes, and in what Moses and Jesus were given, and in what the prophets were all given from their Lord; we make no distinction between any of them, and to Him we submit.”

He also said, “Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward…"