and Allah has kept him far removed from them. Every rational person knows that these accusations are lies, fabrications, and slander.

As for your claim that the prophets’ being bewitched is incompatible with Allah’s protection of them: just as He protects, safeguards, preserves, and cares for them, He also tests them with whatever harm He wills the disbelievers to inflict upon them, so that they may merit the full measure of His honour. This also affords consolation to those of their communities and successors who come after them when people harm them: seeing what befell the messengers and prophets, they remain patient and content, and follow their example. It also allows the measure of the disbelievers’ wrongdoing to become full, so that they deserve the immediate chastisement and future punishment He has prepared for them. He then destroys them because of their oppression and aggression, hastening to cleanse the earth of them. These are among the purposes of His wisdom in testing His prophets and messengers with harm from their people. His is consummate wisdom and abundant favour. There is no god but Him and no Lord besides Him.

His words, “From the evil of those who blow on knots,” and the aforementioned hadith of ‘Ā’ishah demonstrate that sorcery has an effect and is real.

A group of speculative theologians, including some Mu‘tazilites and others, have denied this. They say that sorcery has absolutely no effect, whether in causing illness or death, or in loosening or binding. They maintain that it merely creates an illusion in the eyes of onlookers and has no reality beyond that.

This contradicts the views abundantly transmitted from the Companions and the early generations, the consensus of the jurists and scholars of Quranic commentary and hadith, and what rational people generally know.

Sorcery that causes illness, heaviness, binding, love, hatred, bleeding, and other effects exists and is commonly known. Many people have known it through direct experience of its afflictions. His words, Most High, “And from the evil of those who blow on knots,” demonstrate that this blowing harms the bewitched person even in their absence from the sorcerer. If harm could occur only through direct outward contact with the body, as these people claim, neither the blowing nor those who blow would possess any evil from which refuge should be sought.

Furthermore, if a sorcerer can bewitch the eyes of all who look on, however numerous they may be,