and others besides them whose description would be too lengthy.

The point here is that Ibn Sīnā himself reports that the members of his own household—his father and his brother—were among these atheistic freethinkers, and that he turned to philosophy on that account, for he used to hear them speak of the Intellect and the Soul.

As for those Muslims with whom he claimed affiliation, despite their manifest irreligion and their concealed unbelief, they still possessed a greater knowledge of God than did his philosophical predecessors such as Aristotle and his followers; those earlier philosophers had no more knowledge of God than the pagan idol-worshippers of Arabia—and even that was of poorer quality.

I have already cited Aristotle’s own words in his treatment of metaphysics in Book Lambda and elsewhere—this being the furthest reach of his philosophy—and have exposed some of the ignorance it contains. Among all the groups known for discoursing on theology, however erroneous or deviant—be they Jewish or Christian scholars, or the innovators among Muslims and others—none are more ignorant or further removed from the knowledge of God, exalted be He, than these philosophers.

Granted, in the natural sciences they have produced a vast and largely sound body of discourse; endowed with intellects, they were able to grasp such matters, and they may well have intended truth without any overt stubbornness. Yet in divine knowledge they are utterly ignorant: what little they possess of it is meager and riddled with error.

Thus, when Ibn Sīnā learned something of the Muslims’ religion—after having absorbed what he had from the atheists and, better than they, from the Muʿtazilah and the Rāfiḍah—he sought to combine what his intellect had grasped with