by the Messenger or the aims of these people, he accepts this. This is especially so if the person advancing it has a substantial grounding in scholarship, dialectical theology, Sufism, asceticism, jurisprudence, and worship; if the student regards him as standing above the jurists, who know only the outward teachings of the revealed law, and above the hadith scholar, whose utmost achievement is to transmit words whose meanings are unknown—and likewise above the Quran reciter and commentator; if he sees the theologians whom he venerates either agreeing with these people or fearing them; and if he finds that, in their exchanges with them on many issues, the theologians have offered no rigorous demonstration exposing the falsity of their views.

Rather, the theologians sometimes agree with them on unsound foundational principles, and sometimes oppose something the philosophers have said that is actually true. An example is someone seeing many theologians oppose them on matters of natural science and mathematics, believing that they are defending the revealed law, when the revealed law actually agrees with what is known through reason.

One such matter is the spherical shape of the celestial spheres: no disagreement among the early generations is known concerning their being spherical. Reports to that effect are well known, and the Quran and Sunnah both indicate it. Likewise, the transformation of bodies into one another is something on which the jurists agree, as these thinkers also maintain. There are other such matters as well.

Yet many theologians—or most of them—have no familiarity with what is indicated by the Quran, the Sunnah, and the reports of the Companions and those who followed them in righteousness. Instead, they defend doctrines they suppose to constitute the religion of the Muslims—indeed, the consensus of the Muslims—yet these doctrines have never been asserted by anyone among