This is likewise the view held by Abū ʿAlī, Abū Hāshim, and al-Ashʿarī in the more prevalent of his two opinions, as well as by al-Qāḍī Abū Bakr, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, and others.

Although this opinion is weak—contradicting the Qur’an, the Sunnah, and the consensus of the early generations, and unsound both legally and rationally—those who espouse it are honorable scholars whose aim was the truth; they never intended to utter what they knew to be false. A detailed discussion of this question has been presented elsewhere.

The point at hand is that the “philosophers” are the sages of Greece. Every nation, whether of the People of the Scripture or otherwise, has sages in accordance with its religion: the polytheists of India had their wise men, the Magian Persians had theirs, and the sages of the Muslims are those who possess knowledge of what God’s Messenger brought and act upon it. Mālik said, “Wisdom is to know the religion and to practice it,” and Ibn Qutaybah and others said, “In the language, wisdom (ḥikmah) means knowledge combined with action.” Thus, whoever learns what the Messengers have reported, believes in it with understanding, and learns what they have commanded and then listens and obeys, has been granted wisdom—“and whoever is given wisdom has indeed been granted abundant good.”

Because this is the root meaning of the word “philosophy,” it came to be applied to anyone who followed the path of those Greeks and adopted their so-called wisdom. Some of the later adherents articulated these ideas and tried to adapt them to the various religions; yet, were those doctrines stated in their original form, the falsehood they contain would be so apparent that every intelligent person acquainted with the prophets’ religion would recoil from them. For the prophets have brought, regarding matters of the Divine, such knowledge and elucidation that the “wisdom” of the Greeks beside it is like the folk remedies of old women next to the medicine of Hippocrates, or like a rudimentary Bedouin parsing manual beside Sībawayh’s magnum opus.