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Among the nations were disbelievers and hypocrites who rejected some of the message but not all of it, whether in respect of its extent or its character, just as there were disbelievers and hypocrites who rejected the message altogether. Among those who rejected the message altogether were some who claimed that the Messenger was a poet, a sorcerer, a soothsayer, someone taught by others, a madman, or a fabricator. Such was al-Walīd ibn al-Mughīra, “the Peerless,” the chief, philosopher, and sage of Quraysh, who is mentioned in the words of Allah Most High:

“Leave Me with the one I created alone, and to whom I granted abundant wealth and sons by his side, and for whom I made ample provision. Yet he desires that I give him more. No! He has stubbornly opposed Our signs. I shall burden him with an arduous ascent. He thought and calculated. May he be destroyed—how he calculated! Again, may he be destroyed—how he calculated! Then he looked; then he frowned and scowled; then he turned away in arrogance and said, ‘This is nothing but magic passed down; this is nothing but the word of a human being.’”

He acted as a philosopher opposed to the messengers acts: first he thought—that is, he sought to proceed from conceiving the two terms of a proposition to the premises that necessitate assent, in order to discover the middle term. Then, secondly, he calculated. This calculation is “syllogistic reasoning”: proceeding from the premises to the desired conclusion through a logical syllogism based on subsumption. And, by my life,