condition of someone who engages in it is to be on a par with a layman. Knowledge lies only in answering the question. This is why you find that most of their arguments carry equal weight, since each of them undermines the other’s proofs.

It has been said that al-Ashʿarī—although he was among those closest to the Sunnah and hadith, and most knowledgeable about them—composed a book towards the end of his life on the equal weight of competing proofs, meaning the proofs of speculative theology, for that was the discipline in which he was proficient. Their leading scholars have continually acknowledged the absence of proofs and guidance in their approach, as we have related from Abū Hāmid and others. Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī even said:

“The people who have the most doubts at the time of death are the speculative theologians.”

Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Rāzī is among the most notable examples in this regard—the realm of bewilderment, doubt, and instability. Yet he goes to excess in this: he has an insatiable appetite for raising doubts rather than establishing the truth. Others, by contrast, establish something and hold firmly to some element of truth. Yet some people may hold firmly to pure falsehood—rather, it must contain some element of truth.

Among the distinguished later scholars, and those most accomplished in philosophy and speculative theology, was Ibn Wāsil al-Hamawī. He used to say:

“I lie on my back and draw the covering over half my face. Then I review the doctrines, the arguments of this group and that, and the objections of this group and that, until dawn breaks, without any view having gained greater weight in my judgment.”

For this reason, al-Khattābī recited:

Arguments shatter like glass: you take them for truth,
Yet each breaks another and is itself broken.

If this is the state of their arguments, what futile talk, falsehood, and empty verbiage could be greater than this?