“Our revelations came to you, but you forgot them; and in the same way you will be forgotten today.”
The Exalted also says:
“When it is said to them, ‘Come to what Allah has revealed and to the Messenger,’ you see the hypocrites turning away from you in arrogant aversion.”
And He says:
“The likeness of those who disbelieve is that of one who calls out to something that hears nothing but a cry and a shout—deaf, dumb, and blind; and so they do not reason.”
In the same vein, many of the innovators, scholastic theologians, and philosophers repudiate the prophetic and early reports that are well known—indeed mass-transmitted—among the scholars of ḥadīth and the Sunnah, handed down from the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), his Companions, and those who followed them with excellence.
These people say, “Such matters are not known to us,” just as some disbelievers claim that the prophets’ miracles are unknown to them. Their claim arises only because they have not employed the means that lead to such knowledge; for had they listened to what the earlier generations heard, and read the authored works those generations read, they would have acquired the same knowledge.
Not knowing something is not the same as knowing that it does not exist, and failing to find a thing does not entail that the thing is absent. When they lack knowledge of a matter, that is no proof of its non-existence, nor of other people’s ignorance of it. Rather, they are exactly as Allah, Exalted be He, says: “Nay, they have denied that of which they have no encompassing knowledge, and its final interpretation has not yet reached them.”
The denial voiced by those who reject the existence of the jinn falls under the same heading. The physician or the philosopher has no rational proof negating their existence; at most he can say that his own discipline offers no evidence for them. That amounts only to a lack of knowledge, not to knowledge of non-existence—a point acknowledged by leading physicians and philosophers such as Hippocrates and others.
Our aim here is simply to highlight the broad avenues of knowledge that these—and others—have discussed.