the minds or religious beliefs of many people, as they mixed what the logicians said about definitions with the prophetic knowledge brought by the Messengers and preserved among Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and with the other sciences, such as medicine, grammar, and so forth. They began to magnify the importance of definitions, claiming that they alone had mastered the subject, and that the definitions offered by others were merely verbal and did not convey an understanding of essence and reality, unlike their own definitions.

They follow long, difficult paths and employ contrived, formidable expressions. Yet this serves only to waste time, exhaust minds, multiply senseless talk, claim rigorous understanding through lies and falsehoods, and occupy souls with what does not benefit them—and may even turn them away from what is indispensable. It entrenches in hearts the ignorance that is the root of hypocrisy, although they claim it to be the foundation of knowledge and rigorous understanding.

This is among the consequences of the speculative theology that the early generations used to prohibit, although what they prohibited was better and sounder than this, since it concerned proofs and judgments. The earlier speculative theologians were unwilling to delve into definitions in the manner of the logicians, as their successors so earnestly did, imagining this to be rigorous inquiry. It is nothing but a deviation from the straight path.

Thus, because these definitions and the like give a person no knowledge that he did not already possess, yielding only an abundance of talk, they were called “the people of kalām (discourse).” All this, by my life, concerns definitions that contain no falsehood. As for the logicians’ definitions, which they claim