And he said:

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People have differed concerning this station—the ultimate goal sought by Allah’s servants.

A group of philosophers and others like them suppose that the soul’s perfection lies in knowledge alone. They identify the knowledge through which it attains perfection with what they themselves know of metaphysics. They regard acts of worship as exercises that refine the soul’s character until it becomes prepared for knowledge. The soul thus becomes a separate world, parallel to the existing world. These people are misguided—indeed, unbelievers—for several reasons.

One is that they believe perfection consists in knowledge alone, just as Jahm, al-Sālihī, al-Ash'arī—according to the better-known of his two views—and most of his followers believed that faith consists in knowledge alone. Yet these philosophers are in a worse position than the Jahmiyyah: the Jahmiyyah identify faith with knowledge of Allah, whereas those philosophers locate the soul’s perfection in its knowledge of absolute existence, considered simply as existence.

What is absolute, when conditioned by its absoluteness, exists only in minds, not among concrete entities. What is absolute, considered without any condition, likewise exists in external reality only as something particular. Even if they know universal existence, divided into necessary and contingent existence, the object of their knowledge has no