the Scripture, he combines both forms of disbelief: disbelief in the Seal of the Messengers, and disbelief in the reality of the attributes of messengership in all the messengers. Such, then, is their position.

They may therefore be asked—given their knowledge that human beings differ in their powers of perception—what prevents someone’s hearing and sight from being extraordinarily enhanced, so that he hears and sees things existing outside the mind that others do not perceive? As the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:

“I see what you do not see and hear what you do not hear. Heaven creaks, and well may it creak: there is not a space four fingers wide in it without an angel standing, sitting, bowing, or prostrating.”

This is perception, through the outward or inward senses, of something existing outside the mind. Likewise, you know that self-evident universal knowledge has no fixed limit among human beings. How, then, do you know that certain souls possess self-evident knowledge peculiar to themselves alone, or shared with others like them, which is not self-evident to you?

If this is possible—and people across the earth generally affirm that it occurs among those who are not prophets, let alone among prophets—then your logic offers no way of attaining such knowledge. It belongs neither to widely accepted premises nor to dialectical premises, nor do you regard its underlying premises as certain. Yet you have no knowledge that would establish its nonexistence, while the majority of people across the earth, in earlier and later generations, affirm its existence.

If you reject it, then—in addition to disbelief, rejection of the truth, and loss in this world and the Hereafter—you also abandon your own logic and depart from the obligation you have imposed upon yourselves: to assert only what a syllogism entails. For you have no syllogism to support this denial