This subject is far too exalted to be invoked merely in order to grant it priority over philosophy. My concern here is with the rational sciences that are acquired through rational proofs; as for what the prophets brought, that occupies a loftier station altogether.
Now, the scholastic theologians (mutakallimūn) who belong to the religious communities—whom the Sunnis still regard as members of those communities, such as the Jahmiyyah, the Muʿtazilah, and all the schools that branch off from them—are branded by the philosophers as mere dialecticians, not men of demonstration. The philosophers cast themselves as the true possessors of demonstration, describing the theologians as “people of dialectic” and classifying their proofs as dialectical syllogisms. This is because the philosophers divide syllogisms into five kinds: demonstrative, rhetorical, dialectical, poetic, and sophistic—a division we shall explain, God willing. Hence you find Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, and other philosophers labeling those theologians “dialecticians,” asserting that the premises on which they rely are dialectical rather than demonstrative, while claiming for themselves the mantle of demonstration.
We do not deny that much of what the mutakallimūn say is indeed false. Yet if one speaks with fairness and justice and compares the theological discussions of their first teacher, Aristotle, and his like with the writings of those whom Muslims deem among the worst of the theologians—such as the Jahmiyyah and the Muʿtazilah—he will discover differences in the rationally demonstrable sciences that reveal the philosophers’ extreme ignorance beside the theologians, differences too numerous to catalogue. Aristotle’s texts are available, as are the works of those theologians; and it is plain that the latter employ certain, demonstrative premises far more often—vastly more often—than Aristotle and his peers.
Indeed, Aristotle bases most of his discourse on divinity upon sophistic premises of the utmost corruption. Were this the proper place, I would cite his very words from the treatise on the letter Lambda, the last of his works, as well as from his so-called Theology.