This entire edifice is built upon the principles of those infidel philosophers—people even more steeped in unbelief than the Jews and the Christians—whose path these claimants have adopted, albeit with different wording. They simply replaced the philosophers’ diction with Muslim terminology drawn from the speech of Allah, His Messenger, the earliest generations of the ummah, its scholars and worshippers, and from those Sufis who faithfully followed the Book and the Sunnah—figures such as al-Fudayl ibn ‘Iyad, Abu Sulayman al-Darani, Ma‘ruf al-Karkhi, al-Sari al-Saqati, al-Junayd, Sahl ibn ‘Abd Allah, and others. Having appropriated the heretics’ concepts, they cast them in phrases taken from authorities greatly revered by Muslims, so that anyone who hears those expressions imagines that the honored masters intended by their words exactly what these unbelievers now mean—just as the Isma‘ili Shi‘ite heretics and the like have done.

Accordingly, in their scheme Muhammad (Allah bless him and grant him peace) receives from an angel who, for them, is nothing but an imaginal form within himself; that form, in turn, takes from the (universal) intellect. Thus, they say, Muhammad receives from Gabriel, this inner image is Gabriel, and Gabriel receives what he knows from the celestial soul. Ibn ‘Arabi therefore claimed that he draws directly from the intellect—the very source from which Gabriel takes—for Ibn ‘Arabi and these people exalt the path of kashf (mystical unveiling).