and the purposes and wise objectives that Allah embedded in His creation and in His revealed Law, for which He both created and commanded.
The misjudgments of those theologians are precisely what emboldened the philosophers: they supposed that the pronouncements of such theologians represented the religion of the Muslims, or the teaching of the Messenger ﷺ and his Companions. For this reason Ibn Sīnā and others like him direct their polemics in their books against the innovators among the mutakallimūn. Most of Ibn Sīnā’s arguments are levelled at the Muʿtazilah, while Ibn Rushd’s are aimed at the Kullābiyyah. Whenever they expose a flaw in the assertions of those innovative theologians, they imagine that no truth remains save what they themselves maintain—whereas in fact the opposite is true: the sayings of the innovators among the theologians are indeed erroneous and contradict both Revelation and sound reason.
Yet the errors of the philosophers in matters of divinity, prophethood, the Hereafter, and the religious laws are graver still than those of the theologians. In the natural and mathematical sciences, however, the philosophers may at times be closer to the truth than the theologians who contest them, for much of what the latter say in these fields lacks knowledge, rational foundation, and scriptural proof.
We do not disparage what is genuinely known of the natural and mathematical sciences. Our point is rather that the “demonstration” by which the philosophers claim to attain universal, certain knowledge of natural phenomena is not as they describe. Most natural phenomena are customary patterns open to change, contingent upon specific conditions and impediments. By demonstrative propositions that must be accepted, they intend only those in which the predicate attaches to the subject with an intrinsic necessity that admits no alteration whatsoever. Thus, when they say, “Every A is B,” they do not mean that everything presently in existence—or that has existed or will exist—is A. They mean that anything posited and conceived in the mind, indeed in reality itself while bracketing off both mental and external existence, is B. Hence their statement, “Every human being is an animal”: the very nature of humanity, simply as such, entails animality.
They also claim that an essence can be divorced from both external and mental existence—a clear fallacy. It is obvious that if by “man” one intends the familiar creature, that being can only be an animal. This is self-evident and requires no syllogistic proof; for the attributes