and brought a practical religious law that is the finest of all the world’s laws. They acknowledge that the world has never known a law better or more perfect than his. For they have seen how well he governed the world, the principles of justice he established, and the injustice he eradicated. As for the matters of knowledge he conveyed—concerning the Lord’s attributes and names, His angels, His books, His messengers, the Last Day, Paradise, and Hell—when they saw that these contradicted their own beliefs, they divided into two groups regarding the Messenger.
The most extreme among them say that he did not possess this knowledge; his excellence lay only in practical matters: worship and ethics. As for matters of knowledge, they claim that the philosophers knew more about them than he did—indeed, more than the other prophets as well.
These people say that Alī was a philosopher and knew more about matters of knowledge than the Messenger, and that Aaron was a philosopher and knew more about them than Moses. Many of them exalt Pharaoh, calling him “Plato the Copt.” They claim that the man of Midian whose daughter Moses married—whom some people identify as Shuayb—was Plato, Aristotle’s teacher. They also say that Aristotle was al-Khidr, along with other such statements whose ignorance and misguidance are known in their full extent only to the Lord of Majesty. At the very least, these statements betray their ignorance of the chronology of the prophets. For Aristotle, by their own unanimous admission, was a minister