who follows their course. In your view, these are people of disputation, not people of demonstration, and you constantly describe them as contradicting revelation and reason.

If you say, “We are people of demonstration”—meaning those adherents of philosophy who profess Islam—this is the most false of claims. Anyone acquainted with these doctrines and their origins has no doubt that what brought condemnation upon the speculative theologians was the faulty reasoning and misguided figurative interpretation they shared with these philosophers. At best, a philosopher can only be like these theologians.

If the leading scholars and the Muslim community are agreed—and their rational thinkers likewise agree—that, in their statements contrary to the way of the early generations, these theologians are not people of demonstration but people of ravings, then what of your companions, whose foremost authorities have acknowledged that they possess no certainty in the knowledge of divine matters? The speculative theologians make no such admission about themselves. Rather, they say that they have explained the questions they investigate by means of proofs