error in both paths because each of them, or both together, was adopted from the outset apart from faith in Allah and in a messenger … (1).

Rather, both were confined to what the heart’s inquiry and spiritual experience alone could yield—sometimes agreeing with what the messengers brought and sometimes contradicting it. This took the form of purely rational inquiry and purely rational acts of worship, or an ascent beyond these to religious inquiry and religious acts of worship. What is required, however, is that inquiry and action must each incorporate the rational, the religious, and the revealed-law dimensions. When they fell short, each of the two groups fell into misguidance, waywardness, or both.

Their resulting condition was either simple ignorance, simple disbelief, compound ignorance, or compound disbelief accompanied by ignorance and wrongdoing.

This is because the method of those who rely on inquiry and syllogistic reasoning revolves around a premise indispensable to every syllogism employed by human beings: a universal, inclusive premise encompassing both the object sought and something other than it. That is, it does not prevent something else from falling within its scope, even if no such other thing actually exists. It therefore encompasses the object sought not by virtue of its distinctive character, but by virtue of what it shares with others. The object sought through this premise is Allah Most High. Yet they reached Him only through the common ground between Him and others in affirmative and negative propositions. What is common to Him and others does not make Him known in His distinctiveness at all, and so they did not know Allah