As for the Shīʿites, the Qadariyyah, and the Jahmiyyah, the scholars differ—at length—over whether these groups are to be judged unbelievers. Yet whoever regards a philosopher who allows the religions of idol-worshippers, Jews, and Christians to be better than the seventy-two errant Muslim sects is himself no Muslim at all. What, then, of the one who deems that philosopher superior to the various schools of dialectical theology that claim to defend the Sunnah and the Community, and who, after ranking all of these, places the jurist at the very bottom?

Whoever demotes the Imams of the legal schools and their followers—Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, Abū Ḥanīfah, Sufyān al-Thawrī, Isḥāq, Abū Yūsuf, Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan, al-Buwaiṭī, al-Muzanī, Ibn Surayj, Ibn al-Qāsim, Ashhab, Ibn Wahb, Ibrāhīm al-Ḥarbī, Abū Dāwūd, al-Athram, al-Marwazī, al-Khallāl, al-Khirqī, and their peers—beneath the mutakallimūn, then sets the mutakallimūn beneath the philosophers, the philosophers beneath the “philosophical Sufis,” and the philosophical Sufis beneath the so-called “people of realization” who preach absolute oneness—proclaiming these last to be the loftiest of all creation—has he not flagrantly contradicted the Messenger’s religion? In his perverse scale, the closer a person is to the Messenger, the lower he stands; the farther he is from the Messenger, the higher he ranks.

This very logic surfaced during the ordeal these men stirred up in Egypt and Syria. Outwardly they paraded the Jahmī creed, their public badge, while concealing the pantheistic doctrine of ittiḥād that lies at the heart of their Jahmism. They misled certain rulers into advancing their own cohorts and disgracing anyone who opposed them: whoever stood nearer to Islam they dismissed, demoted, and marginalized, whereas whoever stood further from Islam they elevated. They even promoted a man who had been a Christian; after embracing Islam he became a disciple of the Sabʿīnī sect and was known as Ibn Saʿīd al-Dawlah—the very scourge of his polity—and among the verses he recited were these: