And how often have I declared:
O people, you are poised
Upon a crumbling ledge because of al-Shifāʾ.
When they treated our warning with disdain,
We turned back to Allah, and that sufficed.
They expired upon Aristotle’s creed,
While we lived upon the way of the Chosen Prophet.
His statements in Mishkāt al-Anwār and Kīmiyā al-Saʿādah repeat the very words of those philosophers. Thus he even claims that someone engaged in spiritual discipline may hear the speech of Allah just as Moses son of ʿImrān heard it—assertions of this kind have been rejected by Muslim scholars who know what the Messenger conveyed in the Book and the Sunnah: the adherents of al-Shāfiʿī, Mālik, Abū Ḥanīfah, and Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, the verifiable Sufis who follow the Messenger, the ḥadīth specialists, and the dialecticians of Ahl al-Sunnah.
A faction among the practitioners of kalām and rational opinion also faulted him for many statements that were in fact true, claiming that spiritual exercise and purification of the heart play no role in acquiring knowledge. They erred in this denial as well, for piety and cleansing the heart are among the greatest means to knowledge.
Nevertheless, one must cling to the Book and the Sunnah in both learning and practice. After the Messenger, no one can discover, on his own and without recourse to him, the unseen matters that he reported, nor can anyone dispense with what he brought concerning the unseen. The Messenger’s words themselves manifest the truth; they are not to be weighed against anyone’s unveiling or analogy. Whatever a person’s unveiling or reasoning coincides with, it merely coincides; whatever diverges is rejected. Indeed, what they call unveiling and analogy often contradicts the Messenger—such analogy is unsound and such imagination corrupt. Hence the saying: “We seek Allah’s refuge from philosophical analogy and Sufi fantasy.”
A person may purify himself, yet Satan may cast notions into his heart; if he does not hold fast to the revealed remembrance, Satan will become his companion, as Allah says: “But whoever turns away from the remembrance of the Most Merciful, We assign to him a devil who becomes his companion” (Q 43:36), and: “Whoever follows My guidance shall neither stray nor suffer” (Q 20:123).
The difference between the methods of the Muslim theologians and those of the philosophers’ logicians:
If it is said, “The logicians’ enumeration of the paths to knowledge can be found in similar form in the writings of Muslim theologians….”