…the intellects; and—so they claim—human souls attach themselves to it, whereupon whatever it contains is imprinted upon those souls.

For this reason, some shaykhs who speak about the Preserved Tablet in the fashion of these people—whether knowingly endorsing their view or merely following earlier shaykhs who had taken it from the philosophers, as is found in the words of Ibn ʿArabi, Ibn Sabʿīn, al-Shādhilī and others—assert that the gnostic can gain access to the Preserved Tablet: that he can learn from it the names of his disciples, or that he knows from it every saint who has been or will be, and the like. All such claims amount to saying that they know what is in the Preserved Tablet, and this is false, contrary to the religion of the Muslims and of all other followers of the messengers.

The point here is that they maintain that when the soul becomes disengaged from the body—whether through sleep, through ascetic discipline, or by a power innate to it—it then connects to the celestial soul, and whatever knowledge the celestial soul possesses of terrestrial events is stamped upon it. The soul may then report that purely intellectual knowledge in abstract form, or the imaginative faculty may cast it into images befitting it; those images are subsequently impressed upon the common sense, just as external perceptions that are later imagined become fixed in that same faculty. Thus the common sense receives impressions both from the outward senses and from what the imaginative power fashions inwardly. What a person sees in his sleep, or what a feverish patient beholds in his illness of inward images, belongs to this category. The Prophet’s own soul—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—possesses perfect strength, so that this separation occurs for him while he is awake; he therefore knows, imagines, and beholds what others experience only in sleep.

It has been said in reply, first, that this discourse is not found among the ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and his followers, nor among the majority of them; it is known only from Ibn Sīnā and the like. His fellow philosophers, such as Ibn Rushd and others, repudiated it, declaring it a false view in which he departed from the path of his predecessors. Second…