to Pharaoh.’ He asked, ‘Why?’ I replied, ‘Because Moses drowned Pharaoh.’ He had no answer.”

He had argued against him on the basis of worldly ascendancy. I said to ʿAbd al-Sayyid—this had taken place before he embraced Islam—“Your Judaism served you well. A Jew is better than a follower of Pharaoh.”

Among them are groups devoted to worship and asceticism, sincere in what they practise and believing it to be true. Most of them—those who acknowledge both outwardly and inwardly that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah and the best of creation, superior to all prophets and saints—do not understand the true import of their doctrine. Rather, they suppose that it is the realization of what the Messenger brought, and that it resembles the words of those endowed with spiritual knowledge who speak about the realities of faith and religion and are among Allah’s most distinguished saints. They therefore imagine that these people are like al-Fudayl ibn ʿIyād, Ibrāhīm ibn Adham, Abū Sulaymān al-Dārānī, al-Sarī al-Saqatī, al-Junayd ibn Muhammad, Sahl ibn ʿAbd Allāh, and others like them.

Their adepts, however, who understand the true import of their doctrine, know that this is not the case. They say what Ibn ʿArabī and others like him say: that the saints are superior to the prophets; that the Seal of the Saints is superior to the Seal of the Prophets; that all prophets derive their knowledge of Allah from the lamp-niche of the Seal of the Saints; and that he draws from the same source as the angel who comes to the Seal of the Prophets. They have adopted Jahmī doctrines and philosophical speculation, presenting the teachings of the philosophers and the Jahmiyyah in the guise of spiritual unveiling.