did you kill Allah’s prophets in the past, if you were believers?’”

Among the philosophers, heretics and others are those who regard prophethood as a kind of dreaming and hold that its sole purpose is imaginative representation. He, Most High, says:

“Rather, they say, ‘A jumble of dreams! No, he has fabricated it! No, he is a poet!’”

These people deny prophethood. Others hold that the prophets are distinguished by knowledge they acquire through a sacred faculty, without learning. They do not affirm that angels descend with revelation, nor that Allah speaks. Rather, they say that He does not know particulars, and therefore knows neither Moses nor Muhammad nor any other messenger. They say:

“What distinguishes a prophet is this sacred faculty of knowledge, a faculty through which he influences the world and produces extraordinary occurrences, and an imaginative faculty through which realities are represented within him as imagined forms: he sees luminous shapes within himself and hears speech within himself.”

This, in their view, is a prophet. Yet these three faculties are found in many ordinary individuals, to whom the prophets are superior. Although these people are closer to the truth than the preceding group, they are still among those who reject the messengers.

Many adherents of religious innovation acknowledge what the messengers brought, except in matters that conflict with their own opinions. They then give their opinions precedence over what the messengers brought and turn away from it, saying that they do not know what the messengers intended by it, or distorting words from their proper meanings. Such people are found among both the People of the Scripture and those who face the qiblah. For this reason, at the beginning of Sūrat al-Baqarah, Allah mentions the believers and the disbelievers, then mentions the hypocrites and speaks about them at length.