discharge the duties of rule, such as jihad and governance, as many governors’ deputies act when those who appointed them are weak and incapable, so that sound administration results from combining the precedence of the man of office and noble lineage with his deputy’s strength; or even if a ruler does this out of personal desire and ambition for leadership for himself and his faction, excluding someone more entitled to it than he is, and follows the path of those who seize power through aggression—it is well known that a believer in Allah and His Messenger cannot deem it permissible to say of the prophetic message that it is incapable of establishing and explaining knowledge, such that acknowledging it while obtaining knowledge of divine matters elsewhere would ensure the soundness of religion. Nor can he deem it permissible to transgress against it by putting himself forward before Allah and His Messenger, placing his own knowledge and statements above the Messenger’s knowledge and statements. Nor can he deem it permissible to subject it to rational reinterpretations and claim that this perfects the religion, and that the religion cannot be complete without it.

At best, he claims that the Messenger knew that what he conveyed had interpretations and explanations other than what the apparent sense and understood meaning of his words indicated; that he left these unexplained only because he could not explain them among those Bedouins and others like them; and that he entrusted this task to the intellects of later generations. This is indeed what they do.

For the adherents of philosophy say that the messengers were unable to explain the truths because disclosing them would corrupt people, whose minds could not bear them. They may then say that the messengers knew these truths. Some of them may instead say, “They did not know them,” or, “I know them better than they did.” They then explain these truths themselves through the methods of inference at their disposal.

Yet they have failed to understand that if knowledge of these truths is possible, then it is possible for the messengers, just as they claim it is possible for themselves. Otherwise, by their own admission, they have no way of knowing them. The same applies to expressing