denial, any knowledge; for absence of knowledge is not knowledge of absence. Their denial is like a physician’s denial of the jinn because nothing in the practice of medicine establishes their existence. Yet nothing in medical knowledge disproves their existence either. Likewise, you find someone who has mastered a branch of knowledge and thereby distinguished himself from ordinary people who do not know it, yet continues, out of ignorance, to deny whatever he does not know. Human beings go astray more through what they reject and deny without knowledge than through what they affirm and believe.

Allah Most High says:

“Rather, they have denied what they do not fully comprehend and whose fulfillment has not yet come to them.”

This is because human beings generally possess sound senses and reason, so when they affirm something and believe it, it is true. For this reason, mass-transmitted reports are accepted from people of every kind: they report what they have seen and heard, and a vast multitude will not all be mistaken about such matters or deliberately lie about them. Once it is known that they have neither colluded over their report nor derived it from one another—as doctrines and opinions are passed down from earlier to later generations—and that the matter is not one about which people ordinarily err, their truthfulness is known with certainty. A person reporting something either deliberately lies or makes a mistake, and both possibilities are ruled out in mass-transmitted reports. The opposite holds for what people deny and reject: most, or many, of them deny what they do not know and reject what they do not fully comprehend.

Thus, when these people, who suppose that existing things are confined to what these philosophers know, hear what the prophets have reported about the Throne and the Kursī, they say: “The Throne is