Shaykh al-Islām, the imam and eminent scholar Taqī al-Dīn Ahmad ibn Abd al-Halīm ibn Abd al-Salām Ibn Taymiyyah—may Allah be pleased with him—was asked:
Is the human “intellect” an accident? What is the “spirit” that governs the body? Is it the soul? Does it have a mode of being that can be known? Is it an accident or a substance? Is it known where it resides within the body, and where the intellect resides?
He replied:
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of all worlds. In the Book of Allah, the Sunnah of His Messenger, and the words of the Companions, the Successors, and all the other leading Muslim scholars, the “intellect” is something that inheres in the rational person, whether it is called an accident or an attribute. It is not a self-subsisting entity, whether called a substance, a body, or anything else.
The term “intellect” is used to denote a rational entity that is a self-subsisting substance only in the discourse of certain philosophical thinkers who discuss the intellect and the soul and claim that ten intellects exist. This is mentioned by some followers of Aristotle and other Peripatetic philosophers, and by those affiliated with religious communities who adopted it from them. These thinkers have been discussed at length elsewhere, and it has been shown that what they speak of