are even more contradictory and unsettled, while the Muʿtazilites stand somewhere between these groups in their own mixture of contradiction and confusion. The reason is that they have treated what is in fact unintelligible as though it were intelligible, owing to the subtlety of the questions and the ambiguity of the matter. Otherwise, plain rational truths never conflict, and sound reports from the infallible Prophet never conflict.

I have observed this across nearly everything people dispute in these subjects, in both their minutiae and their major points, and have always found it so—there is no power and no might except through God. A matter may appear problematic and confused at first, but when one seeks God’s help, asks Him for guidance, supplicates to Him, admits one’s need of Him, and follows the path He has commanded, “God guides those who believe to the truth about which they differed, by His permission; and God guides whom He wills to a straight path.”

Among the predecessors of the community and its leading imams, there was no one who ever rejected the proofs of the Qur’an or the Sunnah in any question of the divine attributes, or in any other matter. Rather, they censured the scholastic theologians who turn away from what the Book and the Sunnah affirm toward what contradicts them. Nor did they repudiate sound rational proofs; on the contrary, they argued with clear reason, just as the Qur’an itself directs and attests. Indeed, most theological questions are established in the Qur’an by rational evidences and decisive demonstrations, as has been set out elsewhere.

Yet a faction among the dialectical theologians and philosophers assumed that the evidences of the Qur’an consist solely of its reports, so that one must first ascertain the truthfulness of those reports