means, in their view, removing the impediment within a person that prevents vision. This is a privation, so in reality it amounts to making the servant know. All of this is maintained by the philosophers and the esotericists. They urge renunciation of this world only so that the soul’s attachment to it will cease when the soul departs, leaving it separated from nothing it loves. Abū Hāmid, however, never permits anything forbidden by religious law. Rather, he says that killing one of these men is better than killing a great many unbelievers. These others, by contrast, may permit someone who has attained the knowledge they seek to engage in things forbidden by the revealed laws—even sexual immorality, drinking wine, and other things—if they are among those who believe wine to be forbidden in the first place. Otherwise, most of them do not regard Islamic law as binding at all; rather, they permit adopting Judaism or Christianity. Anyone among these people who has attained their knowledge has, in their view, attained felicity.

The same is maintained by those among them who profess union, such as Ibn Sabʿīn, Ibn Hūd, al-Tilimsānī, and others like them. They enter churches with the Christians, pray with them facing east, and drink wine with them and with the Jews. They incline more towards the Christian religion than towards the religion of the Muslims because it permits forbidden things, because Christians are closer to union and indwelling, and because they are more ignorant, and thus more receptive to what these men say than to what Muslims say. Christian scholars are ignorant; if there is someone among them who dabbles in philosophy,