for a long time, with me refuting whatever he puts forward and him refuting whatever I put forward?”

He replied:

“They are inward impressions that come upon souls, which the souls are powerless to repel.”

The two men marvelled at this and kept returning to the subject. One of them asked to receive these inward impressions himself, so the shaykh instructed and trained him until he experienced them. He had been one of the Mu‘tazilite advocates of negation. It then became clear to him that the truth lay with the advocates of affirmation, and that Allah, glorified be He, is above His heavens. He knew this with immediate certainty.

I saw this account in the handwriting of Judge Najm al-Dīn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Khalaf al-Maqdisī, who stated that Shaykh al-Kabīrī had related it to him. More than one person had already related it to me on his authority before I saw it in his handwriting. The shaykhs have much to say on matters of this kind.

The description the shaykh gave answered them in terms they understood. They divide knowledge into immediate and inferential knowledge, with inferential knowledge resting upon immediate knowledge. Immediate knowledge is knowledge that takes such an inescapable hold upon a created being’s soul that he cannot free himself from it. This is the definition given by Judge Abū Bakr ibn al-Tayyib and others.

Its distinctive feature, then, is that it takes hold of the soul in a manner that makes it impossible to repel. Thus, he told them:

“The certain knowledge we possess is of this kind: knowledge that takes such an inescapable hold upon the soul that one cannot free oneself from it.”

He called them “inward impressions” because knowledge is accompanied by reassurance and tranquillity that impel one to act upon it. These inward impressions encompass both. Many accomplished rational thinkers have acknowledged this, including such earlier figures as al-Kiyā al-Harrāsī and al-Ghazālī