When the philosophizers—such as Ibn Sīnā and his peers—joined forces with them, it became plain to those philosophers that many of the interpretive twists these people ascribed to the Messenger were patently false. Now the philosopher, precisely as a philosopher, has no interest in upholding what he knows to be false. Hence they adopted a course midway between that of those outright heretics and the religion of the Muslims. They acknowledged the outward prescriptions of the revealed Law and left them uninterpreted, yet would still maintain that certain rulings lapse for the elite. In this view they were followed by a party of philosophizing Ṣūfīs, such as Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Sabʿīn, and others.

As for doctrinal matters, they allegorized some of them. Thus they declared that the Preserved Tablet is the Universal Soul, and that the Pen is the Active Intellect; they even claimed that the star, the sun, and the moon which Abraham beheld are, respectively, the Soul, the Active Intellect, and the First Intellect. Likewise they re-interpreted the angels and similar questions.

With respect to the divine attributes, the resurrection of bodies, and the like, the position of their more thoroughgoing representatives—such as Ibn Sīnā—is that these are not to be interpreted at all, for what they apparently signify has no real existence and no knowledge can be derived from them. Their sole purpose, they say, is to address the masses and cast into their imaginations certain beliefs about faith in God and the Last Day, so that the people may benefit from such beliefs even though, in truth, they are false and devoid of reality. The inevitable consequence is that the Prophets lied for the welfare of the populace—something these thinkers regard as the height of prophetic wisdom. They venerate the Prophets’ practical ordinances, but in matters of doctrine they hold that true knowledge is to be taken from the philosophers; as for the Prophets, no knowledge in that realm is to be sought from them.

Among them are those who assert that the Prophet is superior to the philosopher: they claim that, inwardly, the Prophet subscribed to the doctrines of these philosophers, while his special talent lay in fashioning imaginative representations—albeit false ones—for the benefit of the masses. Others declare the philosopher to be superior to the Prophet, holding that the Prophet may not know, at the deepest level, what is fitting for God or the real nature of the Resurrection, but that he is merely skilled in devising practical laws.

And many of the Sufi heretics—such as Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Sabʿīn, and al-Qūnawī