They have fallen into such confusion here that it becomes plain they are engulfed in layers of darkness, one above another. The discourse of their predecessors is riddled with error, further mistakes crept in during transmission and translation, and their later followers only added still more. Thus they came to be in a state worse than that of the Jews and Christians: the latter possessed a religion whose origin was true and came from God, though they altered and distorted it, whereas these people began from the outset with a corrupt foundation, and the corruption only spread through the offshoots. The ultimate conclusions Aristotle reached in matters of divinity contain faults too numerous to recount in this place, and these people are among the most ignorant of them; indeed, the errors there exceed those found in his natural philosophy.

This is when one restricts the discussion to the philosophy inherited from the ancient Greeks. As for those of them who lay claim to Islam and to the Arabic language, the sound rational disciplines and genuine divine knowledge they acquired from the Muslims made them better, more knowledgeable, and more intelligent than their forebears. Hence one finds in the writings of Ibn Sīnā and the like a degree of rigor in theological questions and intellectual universals that the earlier philosophers never attained—even though he and his peers are, in the view of the believers in God and His Messenger, counted among the apostates and hypocrites.

When they say that the human being is composed of “animal” and “rational,” or of “animality” and “rationality,” then if they mean he is composed of two substances it would follow that everything characterized by essential, necessary attributes is made up of many substances. In man there would have to be one substance that is body, another that is sentient, another that is growing, another self-moving by will, and yet another that is rational—an absurdity evident to every sensible person. But if they contend that he is composed of accidents, how can a substance be constituted of accidents? How could accidents subsist in it, give it its very being, precede it, and yet be its parts? Could accidents ever play such a role at all?