“I have reflected on the methods of speculative theology and the approaches of philosophy, but I have not found them to heal the ailing or quench the thirsty. I have found the Quran’s way to be the most direct.

For affirmation, read:

‘The Most Merciful rose over the Throne.’

‘To Him ascends good speech.’

And for negation, read:

‘There is nothing like unto Him.’

‘They do not encompass Him in knowledge.’

Whoever has experienced what I have experienced will know what I have come to know.” End quote.

Another of them says:

“I plunged into the vast sea, abandoning the people of Islam and their disciplines of knowledge, and delved into what they had forbidden me to pursue. Now, unless my Lord comes to my aid with His mercy, woe to so-and-so! Here I am, dying upon my mother’s creed.” End quote.

Another of them says:

“Those most beset by doubt at the time of death are the practitioners of speculative theology.”

When the position of these speculative theologians who oppose the early generations is thoroughly examined, they are found to possess no genuine knowledge of Allah or pure understanding of Him; they have attained neither its reality nor any trace of it.

How could these men—veiled from knowledge, accorded preference, yet deficient, outstripped, bewildered and floundering—know more about Allah, His names and His attributes, or possess greater wisdom concerning His essence and His signs, than the earliest forerunners among the Emigrants and the Helpers, and those who followed them in goodness: the heirs of the prophets, the successors of the messengers, the beacons of guidance and the lamps in the darkness? Through them the Book was upheld, and by it they were upheld; through them the Book spoke, and by it they spoke. Allah bestowed upon them knowledge and wisdom by which they surpassed all other followers of the prophets, let alone the other nations that have no revealed Book. Their grasp of the realities of knowledge and the inner depths of truth was such that, were the wisdom of others gathered alongside it, anyone attempting the comparison would be ashamed.