and greater.

These deniers—the Jahmiyyah, the Mu'tazilah, the philosophers, and others like them—claim that, in what they reported concerning the Lord’s attributes, the messengers employed imagery and likenesses, presenting the intelligible in the likeness of the sensible. These philosophizers likewise say that what the messengers reported about the Resurrection consists of parables intended to convey an understanding of a purely intellectual resurrection, and purely intellectual pleasure and pain.

Al-Fārābī and others like him say:

“The distinctive quality of prophets is excellence in forming images and evoking them in others.”

A discussion of these people, explaining their error and misguidance concerning such imaginings and suppositions, which do not correspond to their object, belongs elsewhere. One of the chief causes of their error is their assumption that an abstract intelligible can exist outside the mind. Were they to reflect on this, they would realize that intelligibles, which are universals, exist only in minds, not as concrete entities, and that nothing in external reality is an abstract intelligible—that is, a universal.

An exception would be if, by “the intelligible” in their statement, “They represented the intelligible in the form of the sensible,” they meant what a person senses through his soul rather than his body. This is, in reality, something existent and sensed, though through inward sensation and inner experience; it is not something purely intelligible. Nor does conceiving that a person senses his hunger, satiety, pleasure, and pain imply that the corresponding judgment passes from