…and of mushāhada (direct witnessing), riyāḍa (ascetic discipline), and worship, while they pour scorn on rational inquiry and analogy. Yet what they tout as unveiling and vision is, for the most part, nothing but images conjured up within their own minds, which they proceed to label “Reality.” Hence his maxim, “The gate to the land of reality is the land of imagination.”

He even claimed that the Futūḥāt Malakiyya (“Royal Openings”) were dictated to him by a spirit in Mecca; were he speaking the truth, that spirit could only have been a devil—just as a devil used to visit Musaylima the Liar, and likewise al-Aswad al-ʿAnsī and the other imposter prophets.

In the same vein, anyone who alleges sainthood while failing to follow the Messenger finds devils descending upon him. They inform him of various matters, command him to do things, sometimes provide him with food, money, and the like, and may even carry him through the air to distant places. Such men, among would-be saints, stand in the same relation as Musaylima the Liar and his ilk do among the prophets. They experience demonic states, imagining them to be the miracles (karamāt) of Allah’s friends, when in fact they are manifestations of Allah’s enemies.

These people are of the same stripe as the Arab soothsayers, each of whom had a familiar spirit from the jinn; they resemble the ascetic “shaykhs” of the idol-worshippers in India, the Turks, Abyssinia, and other nations of unbelievers, or the monastic elders of the Christians—for all such pagan and scripturalist shaykhs have devils attached to them. The same applies to anyone who puts on the garb of spiritual leadership, religion, asceticism, and devotion while departing from the Book and the Sunnah, even though he may claim to be Muslim: if he is a hypocritical disbeliever, the jinn that associate with him are of his own kind; if he is an open sinner, his jinn are of the same breed; and if he is an ignorant innovator devoid of knowledge, then his jinn match him in that ignorance and innovation.

That the angels are living, speaking beings rather than empty forms:

Tenth Argument: It is by mass-transmitted report from the prophets—peace be upon them all—that the angels…