…in the writings of the Muslim theologians; indeed, some of them quote it word-for-word, either keeping the philosophers’ very expressions or altering the phrasing. The reply comes from two angles:

First: Not everything uttered by the practitioners of kalām is true; only what the Messenger brought is invariably true. Whatever the theologians—or anyone else—say that conflicts with his message is false. The early generations and the leading imams are well known for censuring the newly-invented kalām that contains falsehood contrary to the Qur’an and Sunnah. I have dealt with this subject elsewhere, and we have already noted that the kalām condemned by the righteous forebears—the Companions and those who followed them with excellence—is the false discourse that contradicts what the Messenger conveyed.

These two descriptions always go together: everything that opposes the Messenger’s teaching is false, and every false discourse in religion necessarily opposes what he brought. The falsity of such discourse may be recognized through rational proofs in addition to revelation’s testimony against it. Revelation sometimes informs us directly of what is true and false, and sometimes it guides and directs us to the evidential paths by which truth is known, so that a discerning person can examine those proofs indicated by the Messenger and thereby perceive the truth.

Second: The theologians of Islam did not follow the route of these philosophers. None of them sought to confine the avenues of knowledge in a way that would include the prophets, as the philosophers did when they subsumed prophetic knowledge under their own schema and thus treated prophethood as something attainable by certain clever ascetics. On the contrary, the theologians agree that the prophet is taught by Allah through means unavailable to anyone else, by the Lord’s will and power. They concur that Allah acts by His will and power, that He sends an angel to the prophet, that He instructs the angel and knows what the angel says, and that everything the angel conveys to the prophet is already known to Allah.

Among them there is none who holds that Allah is ignorant of particulars, or that He lacks power and volition, or that the celestial spheres are eternal without beginning. None denies the bodily resurrection. None claims that Allah’s angels are merely mental images—like the sights of a dreamer—or that Allah’s speech is nothing but inner sounds imagined by the soul. Nor does anyone maintain that the unseen knowledge granted to the prophets simply overflows into their souls from a so-called cosmic or planetary soul.