Yet they say, “When we turn toward these beings—calling upon them, entreating them, indeed even worshipping them—whatever overflows upon them will overflow upon us, and upon them will overflow what comes from God.”

A faction among the scholastic theologians then refutes their falsehood with another falsehood, answering corruption with corruption—although one view may be more corrupt than the other. Thus many of them deny a host of mathematical realities, such as the circular motion of the celestial sphere and the like—matters attested by the Qur’an, the Sunnah, the reports of the early generations, and by sound reason.

Or they proceed as al-Shahrastānī did in al-Milal wa’l-Niḥal, where he began comparing the rank of the celestial spirits with that of the prophets, deeming the affirmation of those spirits as intermediaries more fitting than affirming the prophets—thinking thereby that he was favoring the statements of the ḥanīfs over those of the Sabaeans. This is a grave error.

For the ḥanīfs acknowledge no intermediary between God and His creatures in worship and supplication; the only intermediaries they affirm are those who convey His messages. The very foundation of the ḥanīf creed is the testimony that there is no deity but God and that Muḥammad and the other messengers are messengers of God.

By contrast, the intermediaries affirmed by the polytheists lead them to take the angels as objects of worship—an act of disbelief and misguidance. As for the angels’ mediation in delivering God’s revelations or acting only by His leave, that is something on which the ḥanīfs are all agreed.

It is well known that the polytheists—worshippers of idols and the like—were misled by devils: the devils would converse with them, fulfill some of their needs, and inform them of matters hidden from them.

Soothsayers likewise had devils who relayed information to them and issued commands, even though falsehood in what they said far outweighed truth.

In the same way, the polytheists of our own time who call upon others besides God—absent Shaykhs and the dead—have devils appear to them in the forms of those Shaykhs, so that they imagine the Shaykh has arrived and that God has fashioned