These people repeat the very doctrine advanced by Ibn Sīnā and his disciples—among them the author of The Books Withheld from Those Unqualified to Read Them—and by those who agree with them from the Qarmaṭians, the Bāṭinite esotericists, and other atheists, as well as the uninformed who have slipped into Sufism and certain scholastic theologians, such as the advocates of “the Unity of Existence” and the like.

They ground the notion of intercession on their conviction that the Lord does not act by His own will and power, has no knowledge of particulars, and possesses no ability to alter the universe; rather, the world, they contend, is a spontaneous effusion that overflowed from Him without His will, power, or knowledge.

Thus they maintain that when the supplicant seeking intercession turns toward a being he exalts among the higher substances—whether the intellects, the souls, the stars, the sun, the moon, or toward the disembodied souls such as some