intend to point toward Allah and raise their hands to Him. Since they have neither colluded in making this declaration nor been brought together by anyone to do so, their agreement in reporting what is within themselves is like their agreement in other reports of this kind concerning matters of immediate sensory awareness and the like.

The seventh point: This raising of the hands provides evidence in several ways:

First, when a servant whose innate disposition remains intact supplicates Allah as someone in desperate need, he knows with immediate certainty in his heart that he is directing his heart toward Allah, who is on high and above.

Second, he finds that the movement of his eyes and hands as they point upward follows his heart’s upward direction. Of this, too, he has immediate, certain awareness.

Third, different nations agree upon this without collusion.

Fourth, they say aloud, “We raise our hands to Allah,” and report that they find within their hearts an irresistible impulse to turn upward.

Thus, the argument rests sometimes on the self-evident knowledge a person finds within himself; sometimes on people’s reports of the self-evident knowledge they find within themselves; sometimes on what demonstrates that people possess such self-evident knowledge; and sometimes on the fact that people do not unanimously agree upon error. For if the consensus of the Muslims alone can only be true, then the consensus of all humanity, which includes the Muslims, has even greater claim to be nothing but true. These combined arguments make clear