and the beneficial sciences that perfect the soul, their superiority, learning, deeds, and spiritual insight. Were the sum total of every nation’s understanding, knowledge, guidance, and discernment to be weighed against what they possessed, it would prove utterly negligible, bearing no proportion to it whatsoever.

Granted, other peoples may surpass them in arithmetic and geometry, in continuous and discrete quantities, in the science of the pulse, the urine flask, urine, and feces (1); in gauging rivers and carving walls; in devising astounding contrivances; in the craft of alchemy; in agronomy; in astronomy and the motions of the heavenly bodies; in music and melody, and in other disciplines (2) that range between knowledge of no benefit, false conjectures, and knowledge whose usefulness is confined to this fleeting world and provides no provision for the Hereafter.

If what you mean is that the Companions were laymen in the rudiments of such sciences, then by all means—“and that is a complaint whose disgrace is manifestly yours” (3).

But if you claim that they were laymen in knowing Allah, His Names, Attributes, acts, rulings, religion, revealed law and its details (and of the Last Day and its particulars) (4), in knowledge of what follows death, of the felicity and misery of souls, and of the rectification of hearts and their maladies—then whoever has brazenly slandered their Prophet with the calumny he fabricated and denied his prophethood and mission, which to people of insight is clearer than the sun to the eye, will hardly hesitate to slander his Companions as well.