…and Shuʿayb, and the rest of the messengers, as well as all the future events foretold by the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace. From this it is clear that the Prophet’s knowledge was not acquired through logical syllogism.

Indeed, Ibn Sīnā even tried to explain the Lord’s knowledge of His effects in this very way: Allah, he said, knows Himself, and knowledge of the cause necessarily entails knowledge of the effect; thus the divine knowledge of creation is obtained through that intermediary. At best, such reasoning can serve as an argument that He does know His creatures; it can never mean that His knowledge requires a “middle term.” Besides, Ibn Sīnā’s own proof fails to yield its intended conclusion, for he went on to deny that Allah knows the particular details found within other existents. Yet if He is ignorant of particulars, He knows nothing of creation at all, given that intellects, souls, the celestial spheres—indeed every one of them—is a particular entity, and His own essence is likewise determinate. Some of his followers sought to patch up the contradiction by saying that he denied divine knowledge of particulars only in matters subject to change. But change is inseparable from the celestial sphere; it is never free of motion. For a mutable effect to issue from an immutable cause is, of necessity, impossible—as has been demonstrated elsewhere at length.

Their contention that the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen is taken from the celestial soul—and the refutation of this claim in ten points—is as follows. If it is objected that they advance yet another explanation, namely, that the terrestrial events are known to the celestial soul, and that those who wish to reconcile philosophy with the Sacred Law call this the Preserved Tablet, as appears in the writings of Abū Ḥāmid and others, we reply: this is false. The Preserved Tablet (al-Lawḥ al-Maḥfūẓ) spoken of in the revelation—“Allah wrote the decrees of all creatures fifty thousand years before He created the heavens and the earth” (authentically reported from the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace)—is something to which none but Allah has access, whereas the celestial soul is below…