what they themselves do not mean. In their extreme misguidance, they attribute the same conduct to the prophets, imagining that this is the perfection beyond which no further perfection is possible.

It is these heretics who negate both members of a contradictory pair with regard to Allah and deny His Most Beautiful Names. They agree with the Peripatetic philosophers on most divine matters. For after Islam emerged and spread, there was no alternative to embracing it, in hope of gaining the favor of its adherents and out of fear of them. These hypocrites among the practitioners of philosophy and others like them therefore began joining the ranks of these heretics and similar groups.

Thus Ibn Sīnā mentioned that he had taken up this philosophy because his father belonged to the movement of the heretical Qarmatians, whose ruler was then in Egypt. They wielded immense influence in the world, and their history would take too long to recount.

Thus, when the polytheist Turks—the Tatars and their followers—rose to power, these heretics were among the foremost hypocrites who joined them. And al-Tūsī, the leader of the philosophers, who had been a minister to the esotericist heretics, became