that overwhelm it, together with criticisms that undermine it. We ask Allah, exalted is He, to make these investigations and close examinations a means of greater reward and recompense, through His grace and bounty.” End quote.

I say: In discussing this, it should be understood that the aim is to give a decisive judgment and a fair assessment of the arguments advanced by the deniers, and to answer what he has presented on behalf of his opponents. The aim is not to set out the affirmers’ arguments exhaustively. Rather, when one recognizes this man’s standing as the unrivalled authority among the later deniers, both theologians and philosophers, and knows his extreme hostility towards those affirmers whom he mentions and whose arguments he recounts—despite the weakness of their arguments, their limited knowledge of the Sunnah and the positions of the early generations, and the deviations found among them—and then sees how their rational arguments, as he presents them, together with the scriptural proofs, prevail over the full array of rational and scriptural arguments he marshals for the deniers, despite his enlisting the help of every denier, even the polytheistic Sabians, such as Aristotle and Abū Ma‘shar and their followers among the philosophers