Him in knowledge.’

‘Do you know of any equal to Him?’

Then he said: ‘Whoever has undergone an experience like mine will have come to know what I know.’”

He would often recite:

“Reason’s bold advance ends in fetters,
And most of mankind’s striving goes astray.
Our souls feel estranged within our bodies;
Our worldly life yields only harm and misery.
From a lifetime of inquiry we have gained
Nothing but a collection of ‘he said’ and ‘they said.’”

Here, too, is Imām al-Haramayn, who abandoned the views he had espoused and defended, and chose the way of the early generations. He would say:

“My companions, do not occupy yourselves with speculative theology. Had I known that it would bring me to this, I would never have pursued it.”

At his death, he said:

“I plunged into the vast sea, leaving behind the people of Islam and their sciences, and ventured into what they had forbidden me to pursue. Now, unless my Lord comes to my aid with His mercy, woe to Ibn al-Juwaynī! Here I am, dying upon my mother’s creed”—or he said, “the creed of the elderly women of Nishapur.”

Likewise, Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī stated:

“He reported that he had found among the philosophers and speculative theologians nothing but bewilderment and regret.”

He would recite:

“By my life, I have travelled through all the seats of learning,
And cast my gaze among their landmarks;
Yet I saw only a bewildered man, his hand upon his chin,
Or a regretful man, gnashing his teeth.”

And Ibn al-Fārid—one of the later proponents of the doctrine that Creator and creation are one, and author of the celebrated poem in t-rhyme entitled “Nazm al-Sulūk” (The Poem of Spiritual Wayfaring), in which he expressed this doctrine in elegantly worded verse, yet it is more vile than the flesh of