move from one religious community to another—whether because he considers the new creed superior in matters of faith or because it better serves his worldly interests—just as a Muslim might shift from the legal school of one imam to that of another, passing, for example, from Mālik to al-Shāfiʿī or from Abū Ḥanīfah to Aḥmad, and so forth.

Aristotle and the Idolaters of Greece
As for Aristotle and his disciples, they were polytheists who worshipped idols and the heavenly bodies, and such was the religion of the Greeks and Romans before Christianity appeared among them. Aristotle lived roughly three hundred years before Jesus and was the minister of Alexander son of Philip the Macedonian—Alexander to whom the Jews and Christians date their so-called Roman era—who marched into Persian lands and brought them under his control.

A number of people imagine that Aristotle served as minister to Alexander Dhuʾl-Qarnayn mentioned in the Qur’an, but this is sheer ignorance. Dhuʾl-Qarnayn preceded Aristotle by a very long span of time; he was a Muslim who worshipped Allah alone and was no idolater, unlike the Macedonian. Dhuʾl-Qarnayn reached the farthest East and West and built the barrier against Gog and Magog, as Allah relates in His Book, whereas the Macedonian accomplished none of that and never reached the barrier.

The last of their kings was Ptolemy, author of the Almagest; after his reign they embraced Christianity. As already noted, the Greeks and Romans had been polytheists: they venerated the sun, the moon, and the stars, erected earthly temples for them, fashioned idols in their likeness, and imbued those statues with talismans—practices akin to the idolatry of Nimrod son of Canaan and his people, to whom Abraham the Friend, peace be upon him, was sent.