demonstrative, rhetorical, dialectical, poetic, and specious and fallacious. This specious, fallacious kind resembles truth and gives the impression of being true, yet it is unquestionably false. It must neither be regarded as true nor be allowed to influence the soul. Poetic reasoning, by contrast, may influence the soul, just as a person is moved by verses containing praise or blame that his reason knows with certainty to be false. Their imaginative imagery and comparisons nevertheless affect the soul, even when one knows that they do not correspond to reality.

This specious kind, however, resembles demonstrative truth and other things that ought to be accepted, while in reality it is false and must be rejected. It has merely been disguised, just as truth is obscured by falsehood. They therefore called it sūfasqiyā, meaning “specious wisdom.”

Then, when Greek books were translated into Arabic around the second century, as well as before and after that, and the practitioners of speculative theology adopted and reworked them, these books contained various kinds of falsehood concerning divine matters through which many of them went astray. They also contained matters of medicine and arithmetic whose presence in these works does no harm. People became divided over these books: some accept them, others recount their contents, and others assess