…used to declare: “Our master Abu Ḥāmid plunged into the belly of the philosophers; then he tried to come out, but he could not.”
It was also related from him that he would say, “My stock-in-trade in ḥadith is scant.”
These philosophers contend that the highest attainment of a prophet is no more than a syllogism of the same order as philosophical syllogism, or an act of imagination akin to a Sufi reverie. What they attribute to the prophet, they say, is likewise found in ordinary individuals, for the connection of souls to the celestial soul and the formation of intellectual syllogisms within the soul are shared by all people, differing only according to the preparedness of each soul.
Furthermore—by which I mean Ibn Sīnā and those of his ilk—they claim that rational souls are identical in their essence and differ only by virtue of the bodies they inhabit; they are, they say, like a single water poured into different vessels, taking on distinctions solely because of the containers. In their view, the causes of the soul’s qualities are nothing but bodily temperament, habituation, and whatever follows from the two.
Yet I ask: how great a disparity between souls could there be if this were the only cause of difference? It would follow that the soul of the most contemptible person shares, in its very reality, the same nature as the souls of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad—peace be upon them—and that the distinction is merely accidental. It would also follow that many people’s souls are close to, or even superior to, the prophets’ souls and are naturally disposed to attain what the prophets attained.
For this reason prophethood, in their estimation, is something that can be acquired. Accordingly, many of them aspire to receive what Allah’s messengers received and to be given unrolled scriptures, just as more than one individual in our own time has desired, and as was sought by the executed Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī, Ibn Sabʿīn, and others. The root of this is that the “prophethood” they affirm is of the same order as ordinary people’s dreams.
Thus their principal evidence for prophethood rests upon dreams. And so, when Ibn Sīnā and his peers set out to…