for whoever disbelieves in him and in what he brought is an apostate, for true faith is not complete unless one believes in Allah, His angels, His Books, and His Messengers.

As for a walī—a friend of Allah—who is not a prophet, merely insulting him does not warrant execution, nor does failing to affirm him expel a person from Islam. Yet if someone goes to extremes regarding such figures—calling them “Friends of Allah,” “People of Allah,” “Sages,” “Philosophers,” or any other title that he places alongside the names of the prophets—then regards them as the equals of the prophets, or even superior to them, he is to be asked to repent; if he repents, well and good, otherwise he is to be put to death.

So what should be said of the one who claims that the prophets themselves derive benefit from a person he styles the “Seal of the Saints,” and who elevates this supposed “Seal” to the level of the Shīʿite “Awaited One” or the “Supreme Helper” promoted by extremist Sufis and others who believe in things that have no existence in external reality—asserting that he draws from the very source from which the angel who brings revelation to the Messenger draws? What, then, of the person who alleges that the Prophet takes knowledge from the imaginal forms within his own soul that correspond to the intellect, so that he supposedly receives from the intellect just as ordinary rational people acquire knowledge, reducing prophethood to nothing more than the distilled essence of intellect, as al-Ṭūsī, the commentator on al-Ishārāt, and other esoteric philosophers claim?

The point here is to make clear that those who boast of “realization,” gnosis, and sainthood while preaching the doctrine of the oneness of existence (waḥdat al-wujūd) are simply reviving the creed of the Bāṭiniyya among the philosophers, the Qarmaṭians, and the like. They are of the same stripe as Pharaoh—indeed, they are more ignorant than Pharaoh, while Pharaoh was more obstinate than they. Inwardly, Pharaoh acknowledged the Maker, distinct from the celestial spheres, yet he outwardly denied Him in his quest for supremacy and corruption, insisting that what Moses had brought was devoid of reality. Allah, Exalted is He, says: “Pharaoh said, ‘Hāmān, build me a tower that I may reach the pathways…’” (Q 40:36).