and His names, attributes, angels, books, messengers, creation, and command, except for a scant amount. Their ignorance thus exceeded their knowledge, and their misguidance outweighed their guidance. They vacillated between simple and compound ignorance.
Their discussions of natural philosophy and mathematics do not bring the soul to perfection and soundness. This is attained only through knowledge of divine matters, yet their discourse on these matters is like:
“The flesh of a lean camel atop a rugged mountain: neither is the mountain easy to climb, nor is the flesh fat enough to be worth carrying away.”
Their discourse on the “Necessary Existent” contains a little truth amid much falsehood and error. The same applies to their discourse on the “intellects” and “souls,” which their followers among religious communities claim are the angels described by the messengers. This is not so. Rather, their claim that these are the angels is akin to their claim that the “Necessary Existent” is absolute existence subject to the condition of absoluteness, despite their acknowledgment that what is absolute under this condition exists only in the mind. Likewise, upon examination, their discourse on intellects and souls reduces to entities posited in the mind that have no reality in the external world.
Moreover, their discourse contains notions—associating partners with Allah; affirming a lord who originates the entire universe apart from itself, though it is itself an effect of Him; and affirming a lord who originates everything beneath the lunar sphere and is an effect of the lord above it, that lord in turn being an effect of a lord above it—that are far, far more abhorrent than the Christians’ claim that the Messiah is the son of Allah, as has been explained at length elsewhere.
Their early authorities had nothing whatsoever to say about prophethood. Their later thinkers are bewildered concerning it. Some deny it, as did Ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī and others like him, despite maintaining that the world came into existence.