…on water, do not let that beguile you until you have observed how he stands with respect to what Allah has commanded and forbidden.”
Similar warnings are plentiful in the words of the shaykhs, the gnostics, and the Imams of guidance. In their view, the best of Allah’s friends are those who most perfectly emulate the prophets. For this reason Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq is held to be the greatest saint after the prophets themselves: since the sun first rose and set, no one after the prophets and messengers has surpassed Abū Bakr, owing to the perfection of his following. All of them agree that the servants have no path to Allah except by following the intermediary between them and their Lord—the Messenger.
Yet into their path there have entered people of innovation, debauchery, and outright atheism. Such individuals are condemned by Allah, by His Messenger, and by Allah’s pious friends, who are His righteous servants. Examples include those who imagine that certain saints have a route to Allah independent of the Messenger; who suppose that a saint can equal or even surpass a prophet; who claim that a so-called “Seal of the Saints” is superior to the first forerunners or knows Allah better than the Seal of the Prophets; and other such notions promoted by the stray, godless heretics who have infiltrated them. It is from this angle that some who wear the garb of Sufism have begun to dabble in philosophy.
Ibn Sīnā, in his al-Ishārāt, discussed the stations of the gnostics, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī remarked in his commentary: “This chapter is the loftiest part of the book, for he has arranged the science of the Sufis in a manner unprecedented before him and unmatched after him.” Al-Rāzī’s judgment reflects the limits of his own knowledge, for he was not acquainted with the path of the realized Sufis who adhere to the Book and the Sunnah. Perhaps, having observed among the Sufis of his time much ignorance and misguidance, he considered Ibn Sīnā’s discourse the best ordering of their way. In those “stations of the gnostics,” Ibn Sīnā even addressed the matter of the prophethood they affirm.
Blameworthy annihilation and praiseworthy annihilation:
The furthest point that the gnostics—according to his presentation—ultimately reach is annihilation from everything other than the Real, which he affirms, and then subsistence…