his books, as did Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Sabʿīn, and others like them. Among scholars of hadith, it is regarded as a lie attributed to the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, as stated by Abū Hātim al-Rāzī, Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī, and other authors on the science of hadith.

Nevertheless, the wording of the hadith is:

“When Allah first created the intellect, He said to it, ‘Come forward,’ and it came forward. He said to it, ‘Go back,’ and it went back. He said, ‘I have created nothing more honored by Me than you. Through you I take, and through you I give; through you I reward, and through you I punish.’”

Another version reads:

“When Allah created the intellect, He said the same to it.”

This wording means that He addressed the intellect at the very beginning of its creation. It does not state that the intellect was the first created thing. However, the philosophers who maintain the eternity of the world—the followers of Aristotle, together with those who followed their path among the esoteric Shiites, Sufis, and speculative theologians—narrated it as, “The first thing Allah created was the intellect,” with “the intellect” bearing the nominative ending -u. They did so to support their doctrine that the first thing brought into being is the First Intellect. No scholar of hadith has transmitted it with this wording. Rather, the transmitted wording, despite its weakness, indicates the opposite of this meaning, for He said:

“I have created nothing more honored by Me than you.”

This indicates that He had already created something else before it, whereas, according to the philosophers, nothing was created before what they call the First Intellect.

Furthermore, He said:

“Through you I take, and through you I give; through you I reward, and through you I punish.”

He thus made it the means for these four things, whereas according to those esotericist philosophers: