the false principle that it is a sacred faculty possessed exclusively by certain souls (1), because they are more capable of acquiring knowledge, exerting influence upon the world, and imagining what they intellectually apprehend (2) in the form of imagined images and sounds. These three, in their view, are the distinguishing characteristics of a prophet. Whoever possesses them is therefore a prophet by virtue of the sacred intellectual faculty, influence over prime matter, and what he imagines within himself: sounds that are the speech of Allah and forms that, in their view, are the angels [of Allah] (3).

Anyone who has observed the world knows that this degree of ability is found in many individuals, and that most people have some share in these three. This is why many of them aspired to become prophets and why they maintained that prophethood can be acquired. They said this only because they did not affirm that Allah possesses knowledge of particulars, power, or speech that He speaks and with which His angels descend (4).

The Jahmiyya and the Mu‘tazila sometimes answer them with a relatively sound refutation and at other times with a weak one. This is because they hold that the Maker of the world selects one of two identical alternatives without any determining factor, and that an agent possessed of power and choice likewise chooses without any determining factor. Most of them (5) claim that even when power and a complete motive are present, the act need not occur. Thus they recoiled (6) from the notion of a cause that acts necessarily by virtue of its essence. Yet the expression “acting necessarily by virtue of one’s essence” is ambiguous, and what the philosophers assert is false;