as intellects, souls, immaterial entities, separate entities, and intellectual substances can be substantiated only in the case of the human soul and the knowledge and its concomitants that inhere in it. Their designation of these things as “separate entities” derives originally from the soul’s separation from the body at death. This is correct: the deceased person’s soul does indeed separate from the body at death. This rests upon the fact that the soul subsists in its own right and remains after leaving the body at death, experiencing either bliss or punishment. This is the position of the religious communities, Muslim and otherwise, and the view of the Companions, those who followed them in righteousness, and all the other leading Muslim scholars, although many speculative theologians claim that the soul is the life that inheres in the body.

Some of them say that it is a constituent part of the body, like the air circulating within it or the vapour issuing from the heart. In short, according to the early generations of the Muslim community and its leading scholars, the soul that separates from the body at death is neither a constituent part of the body nor one of its attributes. These two views are held only by certain adherents of newly invented speculative theology among the followers of the Jahmiyyah, the Muʿtazilah, and others like them. The Peripatetic philosophers acknowledge that the soul remains after separating from the body, but they ascribe false attributes to it, claiming that once it separates from the body, it becomes an intellect.

For them, the intellect is that which is free of matter and material attachments, and by matter they mean body. They may also say: “It is that which is free of attachment to hayūlā,” with hayūlā in their terminology meaning a substratum. They also speak of “matter and form.”