and everyone knows that it is a newly introduced method that the early generations did not follow, while people dispute its soundness. How, then, can they say, “Knowledge of the Maker and of the temporal origination of the world depends upon it?”

They said:

(1) [Rather, this method is incompatible with knowledge affirming the Maker and establishing that He is the Creator of the world, the One who ordains religious laws and sends messengers. Those among the Jahmiyya, the Mu'tazila, and their supporters who introduced it said: “It is rationally sound, and knowledge of prophethood and of the truth of Islam cannot be attained without it.”

Their claim that such knowledge cannot be attained without it was rejected by the overwhelming majority of the nation, among both the early and later generations—especially the early generations and the leading scholars. Their declarations that the proponents of this discourse were innovators, their censure of it and its proponents, and their attribution of ignorance and lack of knowledge to them have been mass-transmitted from the early generations.

Likewise, the claim that this method is rationally sound was rejected by the majority of the nation’s leading scholars (2). Some groups among the Karrāmiyya, the Kullābiyya, and others, however, conceded this point, while disputing with them over what this method entails. They also disputed that the truth of Islam depends upon it, as more than one scholar has stated. One example is what Abū al-Hasan al-Ash'arī stated in his Epistle to the People of the Frontier at Bāb al-Abwāb (3), and what al-Khattābī stated,