through the means by which a speaker’s intended meaning is known. How, then, can their differences over figurative interpretation depend on each person’s level of knowledge of demonstration, when demonstration merely rules out the apparent meaning without explaining what is intended?

Refuting these people would take considerable space, and this is not the place for an exhaustive treatment. The purpose is merely to point out that these eternalists gained the upper hand over the Jahmiyyah through arguments of this kind, until matters culminated in disbelief in the very substance of faith in Allah and the Last Day. They presented this as the demonstration and rigorous understanding attained by the elite who are firmly grounded in knowledge. Thus they distorted words from their proper contexts, deviated concerning Allah Most High’s names and signs, and made the leaders of disbelief and hypocrisy into leaders of guidance, foremost scholars, and heirs of the prophets—even though, in the syllogistic reasoning they called demonstration, they produced nothing but sophistical syllogisms, among the worst syllogisms