Later, other matters reached them—matters that lay outside the scope of their syllogistic method. Determined to force these new phenomena into the same mold, they noticed that some souls possess an intuitive faculty capable of exerting influence in certain affairs, and that what such a soul knows may be pictured to it imaginatively, just as a dreamer envisions what he sees in sleep. They therefore supposed that everything the soul receives—revelation, the descent of angels, and hearing the speech of God—belongs to this very category. They reduced the distinctive mark of prophethood to these three and declared that whoever possessed them was a prophet. Prophethood, in their view, was something that could be acquired, so their leading figures set out to make themselves prophets—as happened with the executed Suhrawardī, with Ibn Sabʿīn, and others.
Ibn ʿArabī, realizing that an outright claim to prophethood was impossible, claimed instead to be the “Seal of the Saints.” He asserted that the Seal of the Saints surpasses the Seal of the Prophets in knowledge of God, and that he himself draws from the very source from which the angel who conveys revelation to the prophet draws. The basis of this claim was his acceptance of the heretical philosophers’ notion that the prophet receives from Gabriel, who in their estimation is nothing more than an image within the prophet’s own soul, while that image receives from the Intellect. Hence Ibn ʿArabī said: “The prophet takes from that image, whereas I take from the Intellect from which the image takes.”
They coupled all this with the belief that every event occurs solely through the motion of the celestial sphere—one of their most corrupt principles and a major cause of their error.
Third: the experiential judgments (al-mujarrabāt). All of these are particular, for experience deals only with specific instances. The same is true of mutawātir reports: what is known by recurrent mass transmission is something sensed—something heard or seen. What is heard is a specific utterance; what is seen is a specific body, color, action, or other determinate object.
As for intuitive judgments (ḥadsīyāt), if they are deemed certain, they stand alongside the experiential ones. The difference between them does not lie in universality or particularity; rather, experiential judgments concern acts performed by the experimenters themselves, whereas intuitive judgments arise from their inner acts. Some people group them all together and call them “experientials.”
Universal propositions, then, are of no use for any concrete existent. All that remains to them are the primary axioms—self-evident rational principles. These universal axioms are nothing more than abstract statements about numbers, quantities, and the like, such as their saying, “One is half of two.”