The Exalted also says:

“Say, ‘My Lord has only forbidden indecencies—both open and concealed—sin, unjust aggression, associating with Allah that for which He has sent down no authority, and speaking about Allah without knowledge.’”

And He says:

“They follow nothing but conjecture, yet conjecture can in no way stand in place of the truth.”

Verses of this purport are many in the Book of Allah.

The true nature of Allah’s angels versus the philosophers’ ‘intellects’

Even though the motions of the celestial spheres are among the secondary causes, not every event issues from those motions. Above and beyond them are other creatures of Allah.

The angels through whom Allah administers the affairs of heaven and earth—those to whom He refers as “the arrangers of affairs” and “the distributors of command,” by whom He swore in His Book—are not the stars, according to any of the early generations of this community. Nor are the angels identical with the Intellects and Souls posited by the Peripatetic philosophers who follow Aristotle and the like. We have dealt with this at length elsewhere, exposing the error of those who try to fuse the philosophers’ claims with the message brought by the Messengers.

They further say that the report, “The first thing Allah created was the intellect,” is proof for their notion of a ‘First Intellect.’ They rename it “the Pen” so as to align it with the ḥadīth, “The first thing Allah created was the Pen.” We devoted roughly a whole volume—when discussing the Sabʿīniyya and other issues—to this matter, demonstrating that the ḥadīth of “the intellect” is weak by the unanimous verdict of the ḥadīth specialists such as Abū Ḥātim ibn Ḥibbān, Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿUqaylī, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Dāraqūṭnī, Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī, and others; indeed, in their assessment it is fabricated.