…expose the error of one side or another in particular. Dialectical premises that do not amount to true knowledge have no greater benefit than this; they are useful only for indicating, in broad terms, where people have gone astray.

At one moment they classify prophethood as nothing more than rhetoric, and at another they count rhetoric as only one variety of prophetic discourse—thereby contradicting themselves. The cause of their confusion is that the Qur’an is a magnificent and dazzling reality whose worth they have failed to grasp; they have no idea of the knowledge and wisdom it contains. They have tried to liken it to the speech of certain unbelievers—Jews and Christians who are, in fact, less misguided than they are in their knowledge of God, His prophets, His books, His commands and prohibitions, and His promises and threats. Were someone to equate the Qur’an with the Torah or the Gospel, his error would be glaringly obvious—yet all of these are the speech of Allah Most High. How much more absurd, then, to compare it with the words of these atheists!

Twelfth Point: Their denial of the existence of the jinn, the angels, and of revelation is an assertion made without knowledge.

One may say to them: you already acknowledge the realities perceived by the external senses, as well as the inward sensations by which a person is aware of what is within himself—his hunger and thirst, pleasure and pain, desire and anger, joy and sorrow. You likewise admit that a person can conjure within himself images of sensory things he has experienced, for he imagines such forms in his own mind.

You distinguish between the faculty of takhayyul (imagination), which forms images of sensory objects, and the faculty of wahm (estimation), which apprehends within those sensory objects an immaterial meaning—such as friendship or enmity. Thus a sheep perceives in the wolf the notion of hostility, though that meaning is not itself sensed, and it perceives in the goat the notion of friendship. You call the awareness of loyalty and opposition “estimation.” Yet you do not discuss the matter in the idiom of the Arabs, for in Arabic usage wahm bears another meaning, as has been explained elsewhere.

In truth, you possess no proof that rules out the existence of things that may be perceived inwardly by certain people—such as angels and jinn—nor do you have any evidence that these spirits cannot assume bodily forms so as to be apprehended by the outward senses.