and whatever has completely left matter so that no relationship with it remains—neither a governing link nor any other—they called an “intellect.”

There is no doubt that the rational soul is self-subsistent, that it endures after death, and that it is either blessed or punished, as the unequivocal texts of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, together with the consensus of the early generations and the leading scholars of this community, all establish. Thereafter the soul will be returned to the bodies. Anyone from among the mutakallimūn who claims that the soul is merely an accident of the body or one of its parts is advancing an innovation; none of the Salaf ever held such a view.

Yet the abstract intelligibles whose extra-mental existence they assert cannot, when subjected to sound rational scrutiny, be shown to possess any reality outside the mind.

Positing abstract entities outside the mind is in fact the very starting point of their philosophy. They observed natural bodies, discerned the universal element common to them, and then imagined that this universal existed externally. The first to do so were Pythagoras and his followers, who affirmed disembodied numbers existing in the outside world. Plato and his school rejected that position, but in its place posited abstract, universal essences—such as an eternal, everlasting “Universal Man” or “Universal Horse” existing outside the intellect. They likewise affirmed an abstract time, which they called dahr, an abstract place, which they called the void, and a matter stripped of all forms, namely their “first matter” or prime hylê.

Aristotle and his adherents then appeared. They repudiated all of this, yet still maintained that such abstractions exist outside the mind as concomitants of concrete particulars. They distinguished between a thing that exists externally and its universal quiddity that accompanies its individual instances, as Ibn Sīnā and his likes have reported—and they erred even in this. They also affirmed the existence of ten intellects, imagining them to be real entities outside the mind, but their proofs are utterly unsound. As for the celestial souls, the earlier philosophers had regarded them as accidents, whereas Ibn Sīnā and a group preferred to treat them as self-subsistent substances, like the human soul—a discussion whose full treatment belongs elsewhere.

The point here is that, once examined, the “intelligibles” they affirm turn out to be nothing but what exists in