Yet this very strain of heresy that surfaces in the writings of Ibn ʿArabī—the author of the Futūḥāt—and others like him, touching the core articles of faith in God, His Messenger, and the Last Day, was never found in the words of the renowned scholars and shaykhs whose integrity the Muslim community upholds. These later figures instead adopted the doctrines of the self-styled Muslim philosophers—such as Ibn Sīnā and his followers—ideas that had already seeped into the works of the author of The Books to Be Withheld from the Unworthy and the like. They then repackaged those notions in an Islamic mold, speaking the idiom of Sufism and “spiritual verification,” just as Ibn ʿArabī did.

At the same time, he takes aim at the doctrine of divine oneness professed by the great earlier masters—al-Junayd, Sahl ibn ʿAbd Allāh, and their peers. He even faults al-Junayd’s famous reply, when asked about tawḥīd, that “tawḥīd is to single out what is contingent from what is eternal.” Ibn ʿArabī retorts, “No one can distinguish between the originated and the Eternal except one who is neither of the two.” He records this and similar statements in his book al-Tajalliyāt, and he has another work