…the very realities that the prophets have reported concerning belief in Allah, the angels, the revealed Book, the prophets, the Last Day, and the existence of jinn and devils—without any mediation of prophetic revelation—are, in their view, accessible once a person purifies his soul; at that point, they claim, such truths descend upon the heart, whether from the so-called Active Intellect or from some other source.

A word of censure regarding al-Ghazali:

Abu Hamid (al-Ghazali) repeats this notion often, and it is one of the matters for which Muslims criticized him severely. By removing the prophets as intermediaries in reports of the unseen, he implied that what the Messenger brought in the Quran and Sunnah provides no real knowledge of the unseen, that one cannot grasp the meaning of his words, or know what should be interpreted and what left as it is. Rather, once a person disciplines himself, the realities are unveiled to him; whatever his unveiling concurs with he endorses, and whatever it does not he allegorically interprets. For that reason they declared:

“His discourse undermines belief in the prophets.”

This claim is taken straight from the doctrines of those philosophers; hence they used to say:

“Abu Hamid was rendered ill by al-Shifāʾ (The Cure).”

Concerning this, Ibn al-ʿArabi recited the well-known lines:

We disavow before Allah a company
Whose ailment stems from the book al-Shifāʾ.