; did you not use reason?” And He says:

“Will you then take him and his descendants as allies instead of Me, while they are enemies to you? What an evil substitute for the wrongdoers!”

Although they do not intend to worship Satan or ally themselves with him, in reality they worship him and ally themselves with him. It has thus become clear that these Sabaean philosophers, who are proponents of religious innovation, believe in only a little of what the messengers brought concerning the angels—their attributes and their stature.

This is because these people pursued only the path of reasoning from the motions of the celestial spheres and drawing analogies with their own souls, while denying and remaining ignorant of aspects of Allah’s creation and His bringing things into existence.

The reason for this is what a number of those who compiled accounts of them have mentioned: their early leading figures, such as Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato, used to travel to the land of the prophets in Syria and receive teachings from Luqmān the Wise and, after him, from the companions of David and Solomon. Aristotle, however, did not travel to the land of the prophets, nor did he possess the knowledge of the surviving prophetic teachings that his predecessors possessed. He had only a small measure of sound Sabaean belief, so he invented these syllogistic teachings for them. They became a framework followed by his adherents. At times, he happened to speak correctly about the natures of bodies or the form of logic.

“As for the earlier thinkers,” they are not known to have had a complete, innovated doctrinal system comparable to those of the proponents of innovation among Muslim speculative theologians, such as Abū al-Hudhayl, Hishām ibn al-Hakam and others like them who devised a doctrinal system