a path on which, they claimed, they combined religious teaching with philosophy. Yet they are heretics who do not belong to the seventy-two sects. Both groups have been discussed at length elsewhere. They are mentioned here only because the adherents of innovated speculative theology—through their ignorance of what the early Muslim generations and the leading scholars of the Sunnah knew from the Quran, the Sunnah, and the reports of the Companions, and through the false theological arguments into which they have fallen—have become the means by which these philosophers introduce false notions into Islam. Through them, error and deviation arise to an extent that cannot be detailed here. When the Jahmiyyah instituted their inquisition and called people to submit to it, and Ahmad ibn Hanbal was flogged in the year 220 AH, that period marked the beginnings of the Qarmatians, the esotericist heretics. Thus religious innovations became a gateway to heresy, just as sins are a herald of disbelief. A fuller discussion of this belongs elsewhere.

The purpose here is to discuss the terms “occupying space” and “direction.” These philosophically inclined speculative theologians came to disagree about the angels: do they occupy space or not?

Those who inclined toward philosophy, holding that the angels are the intellects and souls posited by the philosophers and that these do not occupy space, said that the angels do not occupy space—especially since a group of philosophers did not limit their number to ten intellects and nine souls, as