“…the jinn from a smokeless flame of fire, and He created Adam from that which has been described to you.” Thus the ḥadīth makes it plain that the angels were fashioned from a substance that existed before them. How far this is from the assertion of those who deny any createdness for them, claiming that they are merely ‘originated’ yet not created, or who maintain that they are eternal without beginning and never arose from any matter at all. A detailed refutation of such notions appears elsewhere.

The point to be made here is that, although Abū Ḥāmid’s books transmit much of the philosophers’ false discourse—at times in their own wording and at times in different terms—he eventually went to great lengths to censure them. He showed that their path contains such ignorance and unbelief that it deserves condemnation, and that its corruption surpasses even the way of the mutakallimūn. He died while absorbed in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, yet the Greek logic about which he had spoken so highly never secured for him the certainty he sought, nor did it dispel the doubt and perplexity that beset him. Indeed, he remained hesitant and bewildered concerning some of the loftiest divine questions and most exalted lordly aims, and logic availed him nothing.

Because of the positions he adopted during his lifetime, however, many later dialecticians began to import Greek logic into their disciplines. Consequently, those who followed their trail in later generations imagined that no other route existed, and that the philosophers’ talk of “definition” and “demonstrative proof” was sound and universally acknowledged by rational people. They fail to realize that intelligent and virtuous men—Muslim and otherwise—have never ceased to criticize and impugn it. Muslim scholars have composed numerous works exposing its flaws, and the great mass of Muslims censure it in general, judging by the effects and implications they observe among its proponents—effects that contradict true knowledge and faith and drive them into various forms of ignorance, unbelief, and misguidance.

Hence, the claim that every theoretical conclusion depends on no more than two premises is simply untrue.