Deliverance from Error

Preface, and the Ways into Skepticism

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Praise be to God, with whose praise every letter and every treatise should open; and blessings on Muhammad the Chosen, bearer of prophecy and of God's message, and on his family and his Companions, who lead people out of error.

You have asked me, my brother in faith, to lay before you the final aims of the sciences and their secrets, and the hidden dangers of the schools of thought and their depths. You want me to tell you what I went through in trying to rescue the truth from the turmoil of the sects, with all their different roads and methods, and how I dared to climb out of the lowlands of taqlid, the believing of a thing because one's elders believe it, to the high ground of real inquiry. You want to know what I gained, first, from kalam, the theology that defends the faith by argument; what I came to find distasteful, second, in the methods of the people of ta'lim, "authoritative teaching," who hold that the truth can only be reached by taking it on the word of their Imam; what I came to despise, third, in the methods of philosophy; and what I came at last to accept in the way of the Sufis. You ask what kernel of truth came clear to me as I worked my way through everything people have said; what made me give up teaching in Baghdad, though students crowded to me there; and what brought me back to it in Nishapur after so long away. I have satisfied myself that your wish is sincere, and so I hurry to answer it, asking God's help, putting my trust in him, relying on him and taking refuge in him.

Know, then, and may God guide you well and make your hearts yield to the truth, that the way people differ in their religions and creeds, and then the way the leading scholars differ over the schools within each religion, with all their many sects and divergent paths, is a deep sea in which most have drowned and only a few have come through alive. Every party claims that it is the one that will be saved, and "each faction rejoices in what it has" (Qur'an 30:32). The Master of the Messengers, God's blessings be on him, who spoke the truth and was always found truthful, foretold exactly this when he said: "My community will split into seventy-three sects, and one of them will be saved." What he foretold has come to pass.

From the prime of my youth, from the time I neared manhood before I was twenty until now, when I am past fifty, I have never stopped throwing myself into the swell of this deep sea. I have waded into its depths like a bold man, not a timid and cautious one. I have pushed into every darkness, charged every difficulty, and plunged into every quagmire. I have examined the creed of every sect and tried to lay bare the secrets of every school, to tell the one who is right from the one who is wrong, and the follower of the Prophet's way from the inventor of novelties. I never left a Batini, one of those who say that beneath the outward words of scripture lies a hidden inner meaning, without wanting to get to the inside of his inwardness; nor a Zahiri, who holds to the outward letter, without wanting to know what his literalism amounted to; nor a philosopher without setting out to grasp the essence of his philosophy; nor a theologian without striving to see how far his theology and his debating could go; nor a Sufi without longing to find the secret of his Sufism; nor a devout worshiper without watching to see what all his worship came to in the end; nor a godless freethinker without creeping up behind him to discover what made him so bold in his denial and his unbelief.

A thirst to grasp things as they really are was my habit and my way from the very beginning, from the prime of my life. It was an instinct and a nature that God had set in my makeup, not anything I chose or contrived. And so, while I was still close to boyhood, the cords of taqlid came loose from me and the beliefs I had inherited broke to pieces. I saw that the children of Christians grew up knowing nothing but Christianity, the children of Jews nothing but Judaism, and the children of Muslims nothing but Islam. And I had heard the saying handed down from the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace: "Every child is born with the fitra, the original nature God made him with; it is his parents who make him a Jew, a Christian or a Zoroastrian."

Something stirred deep inside me, and I wanted to find out what that original nature really was, and what the beliefs were that come in from outside through taqlid of parents and teachers. I wanted to sort these borrowed beliefs from one another, though they all begin as lessons learned by rote, and people disagree endlessly when they try to separate the true ones from the false. I said to myself: "What I am after is knowledge of things as they really are, and so I must first find out what knowledge really is." It became clear to me that certain knowledge, the knowledge Arabic calls yaqin, is the kind in which the thing known is laid bare so completely that no doubt remains, no possibility of error or illusion goes with it, and the mind has no room even to imagine one. Safety from error has to be bound so tightly to certainty that if someone set out to prove it false by, let us say, turning a stone into gold or a stick into a snake, this would not give rise to any doubt or denial. If I know that ten is more than three, and someone tells me, "No, three is more than ten, and the proof is that I will turn this stick into a snake," and he does it, and I watch him do it, I do not come to doubt what I know because of it. All it gives me is wonder at how he managed the trick. As for doubting what I know: no.

Then I saw that anything I did not know in this way, and was not sure of with this kind of certainty, was knowledge I could not rely on and could not feel safe in; and knowledge one cannot feel safe in is not certain knowledge.

The Ways into Skepticism and the Denial of Knowledge

Then I went through everything I knew, and found that I had no knowledge answering to that description except in two fields: what the senses perceive, and the truths that the mind finds self-evident. I said: "Now that I have come to despair, the only hope of shedding light on hard questions is to start from what is plain, and that means sense perception and self-evident truths. I must first make these secure, to find out whether my trust in what I perceive, and my confidence that I am not mistaken about self-evident truths, are of the same kind as the confidence I used to have in the beliefs I had taken on authority, and as the confidence most people have in what they work out by reasoning; or whether this is a confidence that is truly founded, with no treachery or hidden danger in it."

I set to work in deadly earnest, looking hard at the evidence of my senses and at the self-evident truths to see whether I could make myself doubt them. At length that long labor of doubting brought me to the point where my soul would not allow me to feel safe even about what I perceived. Doubt began to spread there too, and my soul said: "Where does this trust in the senses come from? The strongest of them is sight. Sight looks at a shadow and sees it standing still, not moving, and judges that there is no motion. Then, by experience and observation, an hour later it learns that the shadow has moved, and that it did not move all at once in a sudden jump but gradually, particle by particle, so that it was never at rest at all. Sight looks at a star and sees it small, no bigger than a gold coin; and then the proofs of geometry show that it is larger than the earth. In these cases and others like them, the judge of the senses hands down its verdicts, and the judge of reason convicts it of lying and betrayal, in a way there is no answering."

I said: "Then trust in the senses has collapsed as well. Perhaps the only things to be trusted are the truths of reason that are first principles, such as our saying that ten is more than three, that a thing cannot be both affirmed and denied at once, and that one and the same thing cannot be both created in time and eternal, both existent and nonexistent, both necessary and impossible."

Sense perception answered: "What makes you sure that your trust in reason is not like your trust in me? You used to trust me, and then the judge of reason came and called me a liar; if it had not been for the judge of reason, you would have gone on believing me. Perhaps beyond what reason perceives there is another judge, and when it shows itself it will call reason a liar in its verdicts, just as the judge of reason showed itself and called the senses liars in theirs. That such a perception has not yet shown itself does not prove that it is impossible."

My soul hesitated a little over how to answer that, and sense perception pressed the difficulty home by pointing to dreams. "Don't you see," it said, "how, when you are asleep, you believe things and imagine situations, and take them to be solid and lasting, and have no doubt about them while you are in that state; and then you wake up and know that nothing you imagined and believed had any foundation or substance? What makes you sure that everything you believe while awake, through the senses or through reason, is not true only relative to the state you are in now? A state might come over you that would stand to your waking as your waking stands to your sleep, and your waking would be sleep compared with it. When that state came, you would be certain that everything your reason had led you to suppose was fantasy with nothing behind it. Perhaps that state is the one the Sufis claim as their own, for they say that in the states that come to them, when they sink deep into themselves and are absent from their senses, they see things that do not agree with these truths of reason. Or perhaps that state is death, for the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace, said:

"'People are asleep, and when they die they wake up.'

"Perhaps this present life is a sleep compared with the life to come. When a man dies, things will appear to him otherwise than as he sees them now, and at that moment he will be told: 'We have lifted your veil from you, and today your sight is sharp' (Qur'an 50:22)."

When these thoughts came to me and struck their sparks in my soul, I tried to find a cure for them, and could not. They could only be driven off by a proof, and a proof can only be built by putting first principles together; if those are not granted, no proof can be built at all. The illness defeated every remedy and lasted nearly two months, during which I was a skeptic, a Sophist as the old books call it, in my inner state, though never in anything I said or argued. Then at last God cured me of that sickness. My soul returned to health and balance, and the self-evident truths of reason were acceptable again, and I trusted them with confidence and certainty. That did not come about by arranging a proof or putting an argument in order. It came by a light that God cast into my breast, and that light is the key to most of what we know. Whoever thinks that kashf, the unveiling of the truth, depends on carefully drafted proofs has narrowed the wide mercy of God. When the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace, was asked what it means when God speaks of "opening" the breast, in the verse "Whomever God wills to guide, he opens his breast to Islam" (Qur'an 6:125), he said:

"It is a light that God casts into the heart." He was asked, "And what is the sign of it?" and he said, "Turning away from the house of illusion, and turning back toward the house of eternity." It was of this light that he said, God bless him and give him peace: "God created his creatures in darkness, and then sprinkled some of his light upon them."

It is from that light that unveiling must be sought. That light wells up out of God's generosity at certain times, and one must stay watchful for it, as he said, God bless him and give him peace:

"In the days of your life your Lord sends breaths of his grace: put yourselves in their way."

What I mean to show by these stories is that a seeker should put every ounce of effort into the search, until he arrives at searching for what cannot be searched for. First principles are not things one searches for: they are present already, and when what is present is searched for, it slips out of sight and is lost. But whoever searches for what cannot be searched for can never be accused of having fallen short in searching for what can.

The Kinds of Seekers, and Theology

When God, of his grace and the breadth of his generosity, had cured me of that sickness, I found that the seekers after truth came down, as I saw it, to four groups.

The theologians, the mutakallimun, who claim to be the people of reasoned opinion and rational inquiry.

The Batiniyya, the Esoterics, who claim to be the people of ta'lim, specially chosen to draw their knowledge from al-imam al-ma'sum, the infallible Imam.

The falasifa, the philosophers in the Greek tradition, who claim to be the people of logic and demonstrative proof.

The Sufis, who claim to be the elect of God's presence, the people of direct witnessing and of unveiling.

I said to myself: "The truth cannot lie outside these four kinds of people, for these are the ones who walk the roads of the search for truth. If the truth has escaped them, there is no hope left of ever reaching it, since there is no hope of going back to taqlid once one has left it." For it is a condition of believing on authority that the believer must not know he is doing it. Once he knows it, the glass of his taqlid is shattered, and that is a break that cannot be mended and a scattering that no patching or piecing together can gather up again, unless the glass is melted down in the fire and made over into some other vessel, new from the start.

I hurried, then, to set out on these roads and to search out thoroughly what each of these groups had to offer: starting with the science of kalam, going on second to the way of philosophy, third to the teaching of the Batiniyya, and fourth to the way of the Sufis.

Theology: What It Aims at and What It Achieves

I began, then, with the science of kalam. I mastered it and understood it, studied the books of its most rigorous thinkers, and wrote in it the works I had a mind to write. I found it a science adequate for its own aim, but not for mine. Its aim is only to keep the creed of the people of the Sunna safe for the people of the Sunna, and to guard it against the confusion sown by the people of bid'a, the innovators who add to the faith beliefs it never held. God revealed to his servants, through the words of his Messenger, a creed that is the truth, and that contains what serves them well in their religion and in this world, as the Qur'an and the reports of the Prophet set out. Then Satan cast into the whisperings of the innovators notions contrary to the Prophet's way, and they clung to these and talked of nothing else, and very nearly threw the true creed into confusion in the minds of those who held it. God then raised up the party of the theologians and stirred them to champion the Prophet's way with ordered argument, exposing the deceptions of the innovators, whose new inventions ran against the way the Prophet had handed down. That is how the science of kalam and its practitioners came into being.

A party of them did carry out the task God had called them to: they defended the Prophet's way well, fought for the creed that had been received from prophecy and accepted, and stood in the path of the innovations that had sprung up. But to do it they relied on premises they took over from their opponents, premises they were driven to accept by taqlid, or by the consensus of the community, or simply because they accepted the Qur'an and the reports of the Prophet. Most of their effort went into drawing out their opponents' contradictions and holding them to the consequences of what they themselves had granted. That is of little use to someone who grants nothing at all except the self-evident truths. Kalam, then, was not enough for me, and it was no cure for the illness I was suffering from.

It is true that as the craft of kalam grew up, and people went deeper into it, and time went on, the theologians came to want to defend the Prophet's way by looking into the true nature of things, and they plunged into the study of substances and accidents, the things that exist in themselves and the qualities that exist in them, and the laws that govern them. But since that was not the aim of their science, their discussion of it never reached its furthest limit, and nothing came of it that could wholly dispel the darkness of bewilderment that people's disagreements leave behind. I do not rule out that it did this for others than me. Indeed I have no doubt that it did, for some, though in a way mixed with taqlid on certain matters that are not first principles.

My purpose now, however, is to tell my own story, not to find fault with those who have found a cure in it, for the medicines that heal differ as the diseases differ. Many a medicine helps one sick man and harms another.

Philosophy

What philosophy yields; what in it deserves blame and what does not; for which of its teachings the one who holds them must be declared an unbeliever, and for which not; which of them are innovation and which are not; an account of what the philosophers stole from the words of the people of the truth, and of what they mixed into those words to pass off their falsehood in the folds of it; how it comes about that people refuse that truth when it is mixed with falsehood, and their souls recoil from it; and how the pure truth is to be extracted from the false and counterfeit coin among everything they say.

When I had finished with kalam, I began on the science of philosophy. I knew for certain that no one can see what is unsound in any kind of science until he has grasped that science to its very end, so that he is the equal of the most learned of its masters in its foundations, and then goes further and climbs above their rank, and sees what even the master of the science has not seen of its depths and its dangers. Only then can his claim that it is unsound be true. And I had not seen a single scholar of Islam give his care and energy to that.

The books of the theologians, where they busied themselves with refuting the philosophers, held nothing of the philosophers' own words but a few tangled and scattered phrases, so plainly self-contradictory and unsound that no sensible person, even among the common people, would be taken in by them, let alone someone who claims to know the subtleties of the sciences. I knew, then, that to refute a school before you understand it and have seen into its very essence is to shoot in the dark. I rolled up my sleeves in earnest to learn that science from its books, by reading alone, without the help of a teacher. I took it up in the hours I had free from writing and teaching in the sciences of the religious Law, though I was burdened at the time with teaching three hundred students in Baghdad.

By reading alone, in those stolen hours, God let me see to the very end of their sciences in less than two years. Then, once I understood it, I went on thinking about it steadily for nearly a year, going back to it, turning it over again and again, probing its pitfalls and its depths, until I could see beyond any doubt how much of it is deception and sleight of hand, how much genuine knowledge and how much mere imagining.

Hear now my account of them and of what their sciences amount to. I found that they come in several kinds, and that their sciences fall into several divisions; and for all their many kinds, the stain of unbelief and godlessness clings to every one of them, though between the ancients and the most ancient of them, and between the latest and the earliest, there is a great difference in how far they stand from the truth and how near.

The Kinds of Philosophers, and the Stain of Unbelief on Them All

Know that for all their many factions and the differences among their schools, they fall into three divisions: the Materialists, the Naturalists and the Theists.

The first kind are the Materialists, the dahriyyun, named for the dahr, the endless time they believe in. They are a group of the most ancient philosophers who denied that there is a Maker who governs the world, who knows and has power. They claimed that the world has always existed as it is, of itself, without a maker; that animals have always come from seed and seed from animals; that so it was, and so it will be forever. These are the godless freethinkers.

The second kind are the Naturalists. They devoted most of their research to the world of nature and the marvels of animals and plants, and went deeply into the dissection of animals' bodies, and saw in them so many marvels of God's making and wonders of his wisdom that they were forced to admit there is a wise Creator who knows the ends and purposes of things. No one can study anatomy and the marvelous uses of the bodily organs without coming to this knowledge, as a truth he cannot help knowing, of the perfect planning of the one who built the structure of the animal body, and above all the human body. But because they studied nature so much, it became evident to them that the balance of the body's temperament has a great part in keeping an animal's powers in being. They supposed, then, that the reasoning power in a human being also depends on his temperament, and that it is destroyed when his temperament is destroyed, and ceases to exist; and once it has ceased to exist, they claimed, it is unthinkable that what no longer exists should be brought back. They held, then, that the soul dies and does not return, and they denied the life to come, and rejected Paradise and Hell, the gathering and raising of the dead, the Resurrection and the Reckoning. They were left with no reward for obedience and no punishment for sin, and so the bridle came off them, and they sank into their appetites as cattle sink into theirs.

These too are godless freethinkers, for the foundation of faith is faith in God and the Last Day, and these deny the Last Day, even if they believe in God and his attributes.

The third kind are the Theists. These are the later ones among them, such as Socrates, who was the teacher of Plato, and Plato, who was the teacher of Aristotle. Aristotle is the one who set logic in order for them, refined their sciences, gave exact form to what had never been put exactly before, and ripened what was still raw in their learning. As a body, the Theists refuted the first two kinds, the Materialists and the Naturalists, and exposed their scandals so thoroughly that no one else needed to. "And God spared the believers the fighting" (Qur'an 33:25), since the philosophers fought one another. Then Aristotle refuted Plato and Socrates and the Theists who had come before them, and did it so thoroughly that he disowned them all. Yet he too kept some remnants of their vile unbelief and innovation which he did not manage to shake off. They must therefore be declared unbelievers, and so must their followers among the would-be philosophers of Islam, such as Ibn Sina, whom the West calls Avicenna, and al-Farabi, and others. That said, no one among the Muslim would-be philosophers did as much to hand on the learning of Aristotle as these two men did. What others have handed on is full of muddle and confusion, which so troubles the reader's mind that he cannot understand it; and how can what is not understood be either refuted or accepted? The whole of what we have established as Aristotle's philosophy, as these two men handed it on, falls into three parts:

1. A part for which the one who holds it must be declared an unbeliever.

2. A part for which he must be declared an innovator.

3. A part that need not be rejected at all. Let us, then, set it out in detail.

The Branches of Their Sciences

Know that their sciences, as they bear on the purpose we are pursuing, fall into six branches: mathematics, logic, physics, metaphysics, politics and ethics.

1. Mathematics deals with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, the science of the structure of the universe. Nothing in it touches on religious matters, either to deny them or to affirm them. Its matters are proved by demonstration, and once they are understood and known there is no way to deny them. Yet two dangers have come out of it.

The first is that whoever looks into it marvels at its subtleties and at how clear its proofs are, and because of that comes to think well of the philosophers, and supposes that all their sciences are as clear and as firmly proved as this one. Then he has heard the talk on everyone's lips about their unbelief, their stripping God of his attributes, and their contempt for the religious Law, and he becomes an unbeliever by pure taqlid. He says: "If religion were true, it would not have been hidden from these men, with all their precision in this science!" When he learns by hearsay of their unbelief and their denial, he takes it as proof that the truth lies in denying religion and rejecting it. How many I have seen who stray from the truth on this pretext, with nothing else to lean on! You may tell him: "Someone who is skilled in one craft need not be skilled in every craft. A man skilled in jurisprudence and kalam need not be skilled in medicine, and a man ignorant of the rational sciences need not be ignorant of grammar. Every craft has its people who have reached the rank of mastery and preeminence in it, though stupidity and ignorance may cling to them in other fields. What the ancients said in mathematics is demonstrated; what they said in metaphysics is guesswork; and no one knows this except the man who has tried it and gone deep into it." But lay all this before the man who has turned godless by taqlid, and it finds no welcome in him. The force of his inclination, his false appetite and his love of seeming clever drive him to persist in thinking well of the philosophers in all their sciences.

This is a great danger, and because of it everyone who plunges into those sciences must be restrained. Even though they have nothing to do with religion, they are the groundwork of the philosophers' sciences, and so the evil and the ill luck of the philosophers spread to the one who studies them. There are few who plunge into them without throwing off religion and having the bridle of piety slip from their heads.

The second danger comes from an ignorant friend of Islam, who supposed that the religion ought to be defended by rejecting every science connected with the philosophers. He rejected all their sciences and claimed they were ignorant in them, to the point of rejecting what they say about eclipses of the sun and the moon, and claiming that what they said was against the religious Law. When this reaches the ears of someone who knows these things by conclusive demonstration, he does not doubt his demonstration; instead he believes that Islam is built on ignorance and on the rejection of conclusive proof, and his love for philosophy and his hatred for Islam only grow. Whoever thinks that Islam is defended by rejecting these sciences has done the religion a great wrong. The religious Law has nothing to say about these sciences, either to deny them or to affirm them, and these sciences have nothing to say about religious matters. There is the saying of the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace:

"The sun and the moon are two of the signs of God. They are not eclipsed for anyone's death or for anyone's life. When you see that, hurry to the remembrance of God and to prayer."

There is nothing in this that obliges anyone to reject the science of calculation that tells us the course of the sun and the moon and how they come into conjunction or opposition in a particular way. As for the saying attributed to him, peace be upon him, "But when God reveals himself to a thing, it humbles itself before him," this addition is not found at all in the sound collections of the Prophet's sayings. That is the verdict on mathematics, and its danger.

2. As for logic, nothing in it has anything to do with religion, either to deny it or to affirm it. It is the study of the methods of proof and of syllogisms, of the conditions for the premises of a demonstration and how they are to be put together, and of the conditions for a correct definition and how it is to be ordered. It teaches that knowledge is either conception, which is reached by definition, or assent to a judgment, which is reached by demonstration. There is nothing in this that ought to be rejected. It is of the same kind as what the theologians and the people who reason about proofs have set out; the logicians differ from them only in their expressions and technical terms, and in going further in their definitions and subdivisions. An example of what they say is this: "If it is established that every A is B, it follows that some B is A"; that is, if it is established that every human being is an animal, it follows that some animal is a human being. They express this by saying that the universal affirmative converts into a particular affirmative. What has this to do with the essentials of religion, that it should be denied and rejected? If someone does reject it, all he achieves in the eyes of the logicians is to make them think poorly of the rejecter's intelligence, and worse, of his religion, which he claims depends on such a rejection.

It is true that the logicians commit a kind of injustice in this science. They lay down conditions for demonstration which are known to yield certainty beyond question, but when they come to religious questions they are unable to meet those conditions, and instead are lax in the extreme. It also happens that someone who studies logic admires it and finds it clear, and supposes that the unbelief reported of the philosophers is backed by demonstrations of the same kind, and so he rushes into unbelief before ever reaching the metaphysical sciences.

This danger, then, attaches to logic as well.

3. Physics is the study of the world of the heavens and their stars, and of the simple bodies beneath them, such as water, air, earth and fire, and of the compound bodies, such as animals, plants and minerals, and of the causes of their changing, their transformation and their mixing. It is like the study medicine makes of the human body, its principal and its subsidiary organs, and the causes of changes in its temperament. Just as religion does not require anyone to reject the science of medicine, so it does not require anyone to reject that science either, except on particular questions which we have set out in our book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Any other points on which one must disagree with them will be found, on reflection, to fall under those questions. The root of them all is to know that nature is subject to God and does not act of itself, but is employed by its Creator. The sun and the moon, the stars and the natures of things are all made subject to his command; none of them does anything by its own essence, of itself.

4. Metaphysics is where most of their errors lie. Here they could not meet the standard of demonstration they had laid down in logic, and that is why they disagree among themselves so much on it. Aristotle's school in this field, as al-Farabi and Ibn Sina hand it on, comes close to the schools of the Muslims. But the whole of what they got wrong comes down to twenty points: on three of them they must be declared unbelievers, and on seventeen, innovators. It was to refute their teaching on these twenty questions that we wrote The Incoherence.

On the three questions they have gone against all Muslims without exception. They are these:

1. Their saying that bodies are not raised from the dead, that it is disembodied spirits that are rewarded and punished, and that the rewards and punishments are spiritual and not bodily.

They spoke the truth in affirming the spiritual, for that too is real; but they lied in denying the bodily, and in what they said they disbelieved in the religious Law.

2. Their saying that "God knows universals but not particulars."

This too is plain unbelief. The truth is that "not an atom's weight escapes him in the heavens or on the earth" (Qur'an 34:3).

3. Their saying that the world is eternal and without beginning. No Muslim has ever held any of these views.

As for the rest, their denial of the divine attributes, and their saying that God knows by his essence and not by a knowledge added to his essence, and teachings of that sort, their position here is close to that of the Mu'tazilites, the rationalist theologians of Islam, and the Mu'tazilites need not be declared unbelievers for such things. In our book The Decisive Criterion for Distinguishing Islam from Unbelief we have said enough to show how wrong is the view of anyone who rushes to declare someone an unbeliever over everything that differs from his own school.

5. Politics: everything they say on this comes down to practical wisdom bearing on the affairs of this world and the government of rulers. They took it from the scriptures God sent down to the prophets, and from the wise sayings handed down from the prophets of old, peace be upon them.

6. Ethics: everything they say on this comes down to listing the qualities and traits of character of the soul, setting out their kinds and species, and how they are to be treated and struggled against. They took it from the words of the Sufis, the people devoted to God, who persevere in the remembrance of God, in opposing their own desires, and in walking the path to God by turning away from the pleasures of this world. In their struggles the traits of the soul and its faults and the corruptions of its actions were unveiled to them, and they spoke of these openly. The philosophers took this and mixed it into their own words, using it as an ornament to help them sell their falsehood. In their age, and indeed in every age, there was a company of such people devoted to God, for God never leaves the world without them: they are the pegs that hold the earth in place, and through their blessings mercy comes down on the people of the earth, as the report has it, where the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace, said:

"Through them you are given rain, and through them you are given your daily bread; and the Companions of the Cave were of them."

There were such people in ages past, as the Qur'an tells. From the philosophers' mixing the words of prophecy and the words of the Sufis into their books, two dangers have come: a danger for the one who accepts, and a danger for the one who rejects.

1. The danger for the one who rejects is great. A group of weak minds supposed that since those words are written down in the philosophers' books and mixed with their falsehood, they ought to be shunned and never mentioned, and indeed that anyone who mentions them should be condemned. Since they first heard those words from the philosophers, it leapt to their weak minds that the words were false, because the man who said them was a man of falsehood. It is like someone who hears a Christian say, "There is no god but God; Jesus is the Messenger of God," and rejects it, saying, "That is what Christians say," and does not stop long enough to consider whether the Christian is an unbeliever because of this statement, or because he denies the prophethood of Muhammad, God bless him and give him peace. If he is an unbeliever only because of what he denies, then there is no call to contradict him in anything else he says that is true in itself, even if he too believes it. This is the habit of weak minds: they know the truth by the men, not the men by the truth. The intelligent man follows the lead of Ali, God be pleased with him, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law and the fourth caliph, the master of the intelligent, who said: "Do not know the truth by the men. Know the truth, and you will know its people." The man of intelligence and understanding knows the truth first, and then looks at the statement itself. If it is true, he accepts it, whether the one who said it is a man of falsehood or a man of truth. He may even be eager to draw the truth out of what the people of error say, knowing that gold is dug out of dirt. There is no harm in a money-changer putting his hand into a counterfeiter's purse and drawing out the pure gold from among the false and base coins, as long as he can trust his own eye. It is the villager who is kept from dealing with the counterfeiter, not the expert money-changer; it is the clumsy man who is kept away from the seashore, not the skilled swimmer; and it is the child who is held back from touching the snake, not the practiced snake charmer.

Upon my life, since most people think themselves skilled and clever, and sure in their reason and fully equipped to tell truth from falsehood and right guidance from error, it became necessary to shut the door, and to keep people in general from reading the books of the people of error as far as possible. Even if they escape this first danger I have described, they will never escape the second, which I am about to describe.

Some of the things I have said, scattered through my writings on the secrets of the sciences of religion, have been objected to by a group of people whose understanding of the sciences has not ripened and whose insight has not opened onto the furthest aims of the different schools. They claimed that these things came from the words of the ancient philosophers. Yet some of them are thoughts that came to me of my own accord, and it is no wonder if one hoof falls in the print of another; some are found in the books of the religious Law; and the meaning of most of them is found in the books of the Sufis.

But suppose they were found only in the philosophers' books. If what is said is reasonable in itself, backed by demonstration, and not contrary to the Book and the Sunna, why should it be shunned and abandoned? If we opened that door, and went so far as to shun every truth that a man of falsehood had happened to think of first, we would have to shun a great deal of the truth. We would have to shun a whole set of the verses of the Qur'an and the reports of the Messenger, God bless him and give him peace, the stories of the pious forebears and the sayings of the wise and of the Sufis, because the author of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, the work of an anonymous brotherhood of tenth-century Basra that set out the philosophical sciences in one great encyclopedia, cited them in his book as evidence, and used them to lure the hearts of fools into his falsehood. That would lead in the end to men of falsehood taking the truth out of our hands just by putting it into their books. The very least a scholar should be is distinguished from the ignorant commoner: he should not turn his nose up at honey even if he finds it in the cupper's glass, the cup used in cupping to draw blood. He should know for certain that the cupping glass does not change the nature of the honey. The instinctive disgust at it rests on a commoner's ignorance, and it runs like this: the cupping glass was made for filthy blood, and so he supposes that blood is filthy because it is in the cupping glass, and does not realize that it is filthy because of a quality in itself. Where honey lacks that quality, its being in such a container does not give it the quality, and should not make it disgusting. This is a false notion, and it has a hold on most people. If you ascribe a statement to someone they think well of, they accept it even if it is false; if you ascribe it to someone they think ill of, they reject it even if it is true. Always they know the truth by the men, and never the men by the truth, and that is the very height of error! That is the danger of rejecting.

2. The second danger is the danger of accepting. Whoever looks into their books, such as the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and others, and sees the sayings of the prophets and the words of the Sufis that they have mixed in with their own, may admire them and accept them and come to think well of them. He then hurries to accept the falsehood mixed in with them, because of the good opinion he formed of what he saw and admired. That is a way of being lured, step by step, into falsehood.

Because of this danger, people must be kept from reading their books, for the treachery and peril in them. Just as someone who cannot swim must be kept away from the slippery edges of the shore, people must be kept from reading those books. Just as children must be kept from touching snakes, ears must be kept from hearing words where truth and falsehood are mixed. And just as the snake charmer must not touch a snake in front of his small child, when he knows the child will copy him and think himself his father's equal, but must warn him against it by being careful himself and not touching it in front of him, so too must the scholar who is firmly grounded in knowledge. But just as the skilled snake charmer, once he has taken hold of the snake and told the antidote from the poison, drawn out the antidote and made the poison harmless, has no right to withhold the antidote from someone who needs it; and just as the expert money-changer with a discerning eye, once he has put his hand into the counterfeiter's purse and taken out the pure gold and thrown away the false and base coins, has no right to withhold the good, approved coin from someone who needs it; so it is with the scholar. And just as, when someone who needs the antidote is disgusted by it because he knows it was drawn from the snake, which is the very seat of poison, he must be taught better; and just as, when a poor man in desperate need of money recoils from taking gold that was drawn from the counterfeiter's purse, he must be made aware that his recoiling is pure ignorance, and is the very thing that deprives him of the benefit he is after, and he must be shown that the false coin lying close to the good does not make the good coin false, any more than it makes the false coin good; so too the closeness of the truth to falsehood does not make the truth false, any more than it makes falsehood true.

That is as much as we meant to say about the dangers of philosophy and its pitfalls.

The Doctrine of Authoritative Teaching and Its Dangers

When I had finished with the science of philosophy, having learned it, understood it, and shown up what is false in it, I knew that this too did not fully meet my purpose, and that reason is not able on its own to encompass everything we seek, or to lift the veil from every difficulty. Meanwhile the movement of the people of ta'lim had sprung up, and everyone was repeating their talk of learning the meaning of things from the infallible Imam who stands for the truth. It occurred to me to look into what they taught, to see what they had in their quiver. Then, as it happened, a firm command came to me from the caliph's court to write a book exposing the real nature of their doctrine. I could not refuse it, and so a spur from outside was added to the motive already working within me. I began, then, by seeking out their books and gathering what they had to say. Some of their newer arguments had also reached me, the ones born of the minds of people in our own time, which do not follow the familiar method of their predecessors. I gathered those arguments, arranged them in a tight order with real rigor, and answered them in full, so thoroughly that one of the people of the truth found fault with me for stating their case so forcefully. "This is doing their work for them," he said. "They could never have defended their doctrine with doubts like these if you had not worked them out and put them in order for them."

There is some truth in this objection. Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the great scholar of the Prophet's traditions, found fault in the same way with al-Harith al-Muhasibi, the Sufi master, may God have mercy on them both, for writing a book refuting the Mu'tazilites. Al-Harith said: "Refuting an innovation is a duty." Ahmad said: "Yes, but you first stated their doubts and then answered them. What makes you sure that someone will not read the doubt and have it stick in his mind, and pay no attention to the answer; or look at the answer and not grasp what it really means?"

What Ahmad ibn Hanbal said is true, but only of a doubt that has not spread and become well known. Once it has spread, answering it is a duty, and it cannot be answered without first being stated. It is true that one should not take the trouble to invent a doubt for them that they have not taken the trouble to invent themselves; and I took no such trouble. I had heard that doubt from one of my own companions who used to come and see me, after he had joined them and taken up their doctrine. He told me that they laugh at the books written to refute them, because, they say, the writers have not even understood their argument yet. Then he set out that argument and reported it from them. I would not have it thought that I had overlooked the very basis of their argument, and so I put it in; nor would I have it thought that I had heard it and not understood it, and so I stated it fully.

The point is that I stated their doubt as strongly as it could possibly be stated, and then showed that it was unsound with the strongest proof.

The upshot is that these people have nothing to show, and nothing of value in what they say. If it had not been for the bad defense put up by the ignorant friend of Islam, that innovation, weak as it is, would never have risen so high. But fierce partisanship drove the defenders of the truth to draw out their quarrel with them over the premises of their argument, and to deny everything they said. They denied their claim that "there is a need for teaching and for a teacher," and their claim that "not just any teacher will do; there must be an infallible teacher." Their argument for the need for teaching and a teacher came out the stronger, and the words of those who denied it looked weak beside it. A number of people were taken in by this, and thought it showed the strength of their doctrine and the weakness of their opponents', not understanding that it came from the weakness of the defender of the truth and his ignorance of how to go about it.

The right course is to admit that there is a need for a teacher, and that the teacher must be infallible. But our infallible teacher is Muhammad, God bless him and give him peace. If they say, "He is dead," we say, "And your teacher is hidden." If they say, "Our teacher has taught his missionaries and spread them through the lands, and waits for them to come back to him if they disagree or some problem baffles them," we say, "And our teacher taught his missionaries and spread them through the lands, and made the teaching complete, since God said:

"'Today I have perfected your religion for you and completed my favor upon you' (Qur'an 5:3).

"Once the teaching is complete, the teacher's death does no harm, any more than his being hidden does."

There remains their question about ijtihad, the effort of a scholar's own reasoning to reach a ruling where no text speaks: "How do you judge in matters you have not heard from him? By a text, when you have not heard one? Or by ijtihad and opinion, which is where disagreement lives?"

We say: "We do what Mu'adh, the Companion, did when the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace, sent him to govern Yemen: we judge by the text where there is a text, and by ijtihad where there is none. Indeed, we do just what their own missionaries do when they are far from the Imam in the remotest lands. A missionary cannot judge by a text, because texts are finite and cannot cover cases, which are infinite; nor can he go back to the Imam's city every time a case arises, for by the time he has crossed the distance and come back, the man who asked for a ruling will be dead, and the use of going back will be lost. Someone who is unsure of the qibla, the direction of Mecca that one faces in prayer, has no course but to pray by his own best judgment; if he traveled to the Imam's city to learn the qibla, the time for the prayer would be gone. Praying toward what may not be the qibla, on the strength of a probable judgment, is therefore permitted. It is said: 'The one who errs in ijtihad has one reward, and the one who gets it right has two.' The same holds for every matter left to ijtihad. The same is true of paying zakat, the alms the Law requires, to a poor man: the giver may judge by his ijtihad that a man is poor when he is in fact rich and hides his wealth, and he is not held to account for it, even though he was wrong, because he is held to account only for acting on his judgment."

If our opponent says, "But the man who disagrees with him has a judgment as good as his," I say: "He is commanded to follow his own judgment, just as the man working out the qibla follows his own judgment even if someone else disagrees with him."

If he says, naming the founders of two of the great schools of law, "Then does the man who follows authority follow Abu Hanifa or al-Shafi'i, may God have mercy on them both, or someone else?" I say: "What does the man who follows authority in the matter of the qibla do, when the direction is unclear? He works out who is the best and most learned in the signs of the qibla, and follows that man's ijtihad. It is the same with the schools of law."

The prophets and the imams, then, sent people back to ijtihad out of necessity, knowing that they might make mistakes. Indeed, the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace, said: "I judge by what is outward, and God takes charge of what is hidden." That is: I judge by the most probable opinion, which comes from what the witnesses say, and they may be wrong. If even the prophets have no way to be safe from error in matters of this kind, how can anyone else hope for it?

Here they have two questions. The first is this: "Even if that holds for matters left to ijtihad, it does not hold for the foundations of belief, where the one who errs has no excuse. How, then, are those to be reached?" I say: "The foundations of belief are contained in the Book and the Sunna. As for the details beyond that, and the points in dispute, the truth about them is known by weighing them in the just balance, the scales that God mentions in his Book. There are five of them, and I have set them out in my book The Just Balance."

If he says, "Your opponents disagree with you about that balance," I say: "It is inconceivable that anyone should understand that balance and then disagree about it. The people of ta'lim will not disagree about it, because I drew it out of the Qur'an and learned it from there; the logicians will not disagree about it, because it agrees with the conditions they lay down in logic and does not go against them; and the theologian will not disagree about it, because it agrees with what he sets out in the proofs of matters that need reasoning, and by it the truth is known in the questions of kalam."

If he says, "If you have such a balance in your hand, why do you not put an end to the disagreement among people?" I say: "If they would listen to me, I would put an end to the disagreement among them. I have described the way to end disagreement in my book The Just Balance: study it and you will know that it is true, and that it would end disagreement for certain, if people listened. But they do not all listen to it. Some did listen to me, and I ended the disagreement among them. Your Imam wants to end the disagreement among them even though they do not listen; then why has he not ended it to this day? And why did Ali, God be pleased with him, the head of the Imams, not end it? Or does he claim he is able to compel them all to listen by force? Then why has he not compelled them to this day? For what day has he put it off? Has his call brought anything among people but more disagreement and more people disagreeing? Yes, there used to be reason to fear some harm from disagreement, but a kind of harm that stopped short of bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the orphaning of children, the cutting of roads and the plundering of property. And now, from the blessings of your ending of disagreement, the world has seen disagreement like nothing it ever knew before."

If he says, "You claim you can end the disagreement among people, but someone who is bewildered among conflicting schools and contradictory opinions is under no obligation to listen to you rather than to your opponent, and most of your opponents disagree with you, and there is nothing to choose between you and them":

This is their second question, and I say: "In the first place, this turns back on you. When you call this bewildered man to yourself, he will say: 'What makes you more worth following than those who disagree with you, when most learned people disagree with you?' I should like to know how you would answer him. Would you answer by saying, 'My Imam was named by an explicit text'? Who would believe your claim of a text, when he never heard the text from the Messenger? He hears only your claim, while the learned agree as one in calling it your invention and you a liar. Then suppose he grants you the text. If he is bewildered about the very foundation of prophecy, he may say: 'Suppose your Imam offers the miracle of Jesus, peace be upon him, and says, "The proof that I am truthful is that I will bring your father back to life," and he brings him back to life, and my father tells me that he is in the right. How am I to know that he is truthful? Not all mankind came to know that Jesus, peace be upon him, was truthful by that miracle. On the contrary, there are hard questions about it that can only be answered by subtle rational inquiry, and you hold that rational inquiry cannot be trusted. Nor can one know that a miracle proves the truthfulness of the man who works it unless one knows what sorcery is and how to tell it from a miracle, and unless one knows that God does not lead his servants astray.' The question of God's leading people astray, and how hard it is to frame an answer to it, is well known. How will you fend off all of this? Your Imam turns out to be no more worth following than the man who opposes him!" The man of ta'lim is thrown back on the very rational proofs he denies, and his opponent can offer proofs of the same kind, and clearer ones. This question turns back on them with tremendous force; if the first of them and the last of them joined together to answer it, they could not.

The damage was done by a number of weak people who argued with them and, instead of turning the question back on them, busied themselves with answering it. That is a matter that takes a long time to explain and does not get through quickly to the mind, and so it is no use for silencing an opponent. If someone says, "This is the turning back; is there an answer to it?" I say: "Yes. The answer is that if the bewildered man says 'I am bewildered' without naming the question he is bewildered about, he is told that he is like a sick man who says 'I am sick' without naming his illness and asks for a cure, and has to be told that there is no cure in existence for illness in general, only for a particular illness, such as a headache or diarrhea. In the same way, the bewildered man must name what he is bewildered about. If he names the question, I will show him the truth of it by weighing it with the five balances, which no one understands without admitting that they are the true scale and that whatever is weighed with them can be trusted. He will understand the balance, and understand from it too that the weighing is correct, just as someone learning arithmetic understands arithmetic itself, and understands as well that the teacher doing the sums for him knows arithmetic and does them truly." I have made this plain in The Just Balance in about twenty leaves; let him study it there.

My aim here, however, is not to show that their doctrine is unsound. I have done that, first, in the book The Mustazhiri, named for the caliph al-Mustazhir, whose command I mentioned; second, in the book The Proof of the Truth, an answer to arguments of theirs that were put to me in Baghdad; third, in the book The Detailed Account of the Dispute, in twelve chapters, an answer to arguments put to me in Hamadan; fourth, in the book The Scroll, laid out in tables, on some of their feeble arguments that were put to me in Tus, my home city; and fifth, in the book The Just Balance, which stands as a book in its own right, meant to set out the scale by which the sciences are weighed and to show that whoever has mastered it has no need of the infallible Imam.

My aim, rather, is to show that these people have nothing of the cure that rescues one from the darkness of opinions. They cannot even prove which man is the Imam; yet we have often gone along with them and granted them that there is a need for teaching and for an infallible teacher, and that he is the one they have named, and then asked them what knowledge they had learned from this infallible one, and put problems to them, and they could not understand the problems, let alone solve them! When they were at a loss, they referred us to the hidden Imam, and said: "One must travel to him." The wonder of it is that they wasted their lives seeking the teacher and boasting that they had found him, and learned nothing from him at all. They are like a man smeared with filth who wears himself out looking for water, and when he finds it does not use it, and stays smeared with dirt.

Some of them did claim to have learned something of it, and what it came down to was a scrap of the feeble philosophy of Pythagoras, one of the earliest of the ancients, whose school is the feeblest of all the schools of philosophy. Aristotle refuted him, and indeed thought his views feeble and contemptible. It is this that the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity set out, and it is, to tell the truth, the very dregs of philosophy.

What a wonder it is that a man should toil all his life to acquire knowledge and then be content with such feeble, worn-out knowledge as this, and imagine he has reached the furthest goals of the sciences! These people too we have tested, and we have probed what they show outwardly and what they hide inwardly. What it all comes down to is luring the common people and the weak-minded by showing them the need for a teacher, and arguing powerfully and unanswerably against those who deny the need for teaching. When someone goes along with them on the need for a teacher and says, "Then bring out his knowledge, and let us profit from his teaching!" the man stops short and says: "Now that you have granted me this much, go and look for it yourself; this much was all I was after." He knows that if he went one step further he would be exposed, and could not solve the least of the problems, or even understand it, let alone answer it.

That is the truth of their condition. "Test them and you will loathe them," as the saying goes; and when we had tested them, we washed our hands of them too.

The Way of the Sufis

When I had finished with these sciences, I turned all my energy to the way of the Sufis. I knew that their way is made complete only by knowledge and practice together, and that the sum of what they know is how to climb the steep passes the self puts in one's road and to cleanse oneself of its blameworthy traits and its foul qualities, so that by these means the heart may be emptied of everything but God and adorned with dhikr, the remembrance of God.

The knowledge was easier for me than the practice. I began by acquiring their knowledge from reading their books: The Nourishment of Hearts by Abu Talib al-Makki, God have mercy on him; the books of al-Harith al-Muhasibi; the scattered sayings handed down from al-Junayd, the great master of Baghdad, and from al-Shibli and Abu Yazid al-Bistami, God sanctify their souls; and the words of other masters besides. In the end I had seen to the very bottom of what they teach, and had acquired as much of their way as can be acquired by study and by listening. Then it became clear to me that what is most their own is just what cannot be reached by study, but only by dhawq, by "tasting," by the state one is in, and by a change in one's qualities. What a difference there is between knowing the definition of health and the definition of being full, with their causes and conditions, and actually being healthy and full! And between knowing the definition of drunkenness, that it is the name for a state produced when vapors rising from the stomach take hold of the seats of thought, and being drunk! A drunk man does not know the definition of drunkenness or the science of it while he is drunk, and has none of that knowledge with him at all; and a sober man knows the definition of drunkenness and what it is made of, and has none of the drunkenness with him. A doctor who is ill knows the definition of health, and its causes and its medicines, while he has no health at all. In the same way there is a difference between knowing the true nature of renunciation, its conditions and its causes, and having renunciation as your state, with your soul turned away from the world.

I knew then with certainty that they are people of states, not people of words, a hal or state being the inner condition that comes over a person and changes him. I had acquired whatever can be acquired by way of knowledge, and nothing was left but what no listening and no study can reach, only dhawq and actually traveling the road. From the sciences I had practiced and the paths I had followed in searching out both kinds of knowledge, the knowledge of the religious Law and the knowledge of reason, I had already come to a certain faith in God, in prophecy and in the Last Day.

These three foundations of faith had taken firm root in my soul, not by any one particular argument set out in order, but by causes, signs and experiences too many to count in detail.

It had also become clear to me that I could have no hope of happiness in the life to come except through fear of God and holding the self back from its desires, and that the head of all this is to cut the heart's ties to this world by drawing away from the house of illusion, turning back toward the house of eternity, and setting the whole of one's energy on God. And I saw that this cannot be done without turning away from rank and wealth and escaping from everything that occupies and binds one.

Then I looked at my circumstances, and saw that I was sunk in ties that had closed in on me from every side. I looked at my work, the best of which was teaching, and saw that I was giving myself to sciences that did not matter and were of no use on the road to the life to come.

Then I thought about my intention in teaching, and saw that it was not purely for the sake of God: what drove it was the wish for rank and a name that would travel far. I was sure that I stood on the brink of a crumbling bank, and that I had come to the very edge of the Fire, unless I set about putting my state to rights.

I went on thinking this over for some time, while I still had the power to choose. One day I would make up my mind to leave Baghdad and be quit of it all, and the next day I would unmake it; I put one foot forward and drew the other back. In the morning I would feel a true longing for the life to come, and by evening the army of desire had charged it and made it go slack. The desires of this world pulled at me with their chains to make me stay, and the herald of faith was calling: "Away! Away! Little is left of your life, and a long journey lies before you. All your knowledge and all your work are a show for others and a fantasy! If you do not get ready for the life to come now, when will you? If you do not cut these ties now, when will you cut them?" At that the impulse would wake again, and I would resolve once and for all to run away.

Then Satan would come back and say: "This is a passing mood. Take care not to give in to it, for it will soon be gone. If you yield to it and give up this vast standing, this well-ordered position free of every annoyance and vexation, this undisputed place secure from the quarrels of rivals, your soul may well turn back to look at it, and you will not find it easy to return."

I went on swinging back and forth between the pull of this world's desires and the summons of the life to come for nearly six months, starting in Rajab of the year 488, July 1095. In that month the matter passed beyond choice into compulsion, for God put a lock on my tongue, and I could not teach. I would struggle with myself to teach for one single day, to please the hearts of the students who came to me, and my tongue would not utter a single word; I could not do it at all. This knot in my tongue brought on a grief in my heart that took away the power to digest and any pleasure in food and drink. I could not get a mouthful of broth down, or digest a single morsel. Then my strength began to fail, until the doctors gave up hope of treating me and said: "This has come down upon the heart, and from there it has spread through the body's temperament. Medicine cannot reach it. The only cure is for his inmost self to find rest from the cares that have come upon it."

When I felt how helpless I was, and my power of choice had fallen away altogether, I took refuge in God as a man in dire need does when he has no other way out. And he answered me, he who "answers the one in need when he calls on him" (Qur'an 27:62), and made it easy for my heart to turn away from rank and wealth, family and children and friends. I let it be known that I meant to set out for Mecca, while privately I was planning a journey to Syria, for fear that the caliph and all my friends might learn that I meant to settle there. I used every subtle stratagem to get out of Baghdad, resolved never to return to it. I made myself a target for all the leading scholars of Iraq, for there was not one of them who could allow that there might be a religious reason for giving up the position I held, since they thought it the highest rank in religion; and that was as far as their knowledge reached.

Then people lost themselves in guessing why. Those far from Iraq supposed that I had done it from some fear of the authorities. Those close to the authorities saw how they clung to me and pressed upon me, and how I turned away from them and paid no attention to what they said, and they said: "This is something from heaven, and its only cause is an evil eye that has struck the people of Islam and the company of the learned."

I left Baghdad, then, and gave away the wealth I had with me, keeping back only enough to live on and to feed the children. I allowed myself that much because the wealth of Iraq is set aside for the public good, an endowment for the Muslims, and I saw no wealth anywhere in the world that a scholar could more properly take for his family.

Then I went to Syria and stayed there nearly two years, with no occupation but solitude and retreat, discipline and struggle, busying myself with purifying my soul, refining my character and clearing my heart for the remembrance of God, as I had learned it from the books of the Sufis. For a time I lived in retreat in the great mosque of Damascus, climbing up into its minaret for the whole of the day and shutting its door behind me.

From there I traveled to Jerusalem, and every day I went in to the Rock, the stone under the great dome from which the Prophet rose to heaven, and shut its door behind me.

Then the call of the duty of pilgrimage stirred in me, and the wish to draw on the blessings of Mecca and Medina and to visit the tomb of the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace, after I had finished visiting that of Abraham, the Friend of God, God's blessings and peace be on him, at Hebron. I set out for the Hijaz.

Then my concerns and the pleas of my children drew me home, and I went back there, though I had been the last man on earth to think of returning. There too I chose solitude, eager to keep my retreat and to clear my heart for the remembrance of God.

But the events of the times, the needs of my family and the necessities of making a living changed the face of what I sought and troubled the clearness of my retreat. My state was clear only at scattered times. Yet I never gave up hoping for those times; obstacles would push me away from them, and I would come back.

I went on in this way for about ten years, and in the course of these retreats things were unveiled to me that cannot be counted or set out in full. The amount I will mention, so that it may be of use, is this. I knew for certain that the Sufis are the ones who travel the road of God above all others, that their life is the best of lives, their way the soundest of ways, and their character the purest of characters. If the intelligence of the intelligent, the wisdom of the wise and the knowledge of those scholars who are versed in the secrets of the religious Law were all put together to change anything in the Sufis' life and character and replace it with something better, they would find no way to do it. For every movement they make and every moment of their stillness, outward and inward, is lit by light taken from the niche of prophecy, the niche that holds the lamp in the Qur'an's Verse of Light, and beyond the light of prophecy there is no light on the face of the earth to give illumination.

In short, what can anyone say of a way whose purification, the first of its conditions, is the purification of the heart entirely from everything but God; whose key, which stands to it as the opening "God is greatest" stands to the ritual prayer, is the heart's being wholly absorbed in the remembrance of God; and whose end is fana', the self's passing away entirely in God? That is its end, I mean, as measured against those first steps of it that come close to being within a person's choice and effort. In truth it is only the beginning of the way, and everything before it is like the entrance hall for one traveling toward it.

From the beginning of the way the unveilings and the direct witnessings begin, until even while awake they see the angels and the spirits of the prophets, hear voices from them and take lessons from them. Then their state rises from the witnessing of forms and likenesses to degrees too narrow for the girth of speech, so that no one can try to put them into words without his words containing a plain error he cannot guard against.

In a word, it comes in the end to a nearness that one group almost imagines to be indwelling, God's coming to dwell in them; another, union, their becoming one with him; another, arrival, their reaching him; and all of that is wrong. We have explained what is wrong with it in our book The Noblest Aim. One who has been overtaken by that state should go no further than to say, in the words of the poet-prince Ibn al-Mu'tazz:

	What happened happened, of what I will not tell:
	think well of it, and ask no more to know.

To sum up: whoever has been granted nothing of it by dhawq grasps nothing of the true nature of prophecy but the name. The wonders worked by the saints, God's friends, are in truth the first beginnings of the prophets. That was the first state of the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace, when he went out to Mount Hira, outside Mecca, where he used to be alone with his Lord and worship him, until the Arabs said: "Muhammad has fallen in love with his Lord!"

This is a state that whoever travels its road comes to know truly by dhawq. Whoever has not been granted dhawq can be sure of it by experience and by hearing from others, if he keeps their company long enough to understand it with certainty from the evidence of their states. Whoever sits with them gains this faith from them, for they are the people whose companion never comes to grief. And whoever has not been granted their company, let him know with certainty that it is possible, from the evidence of demonstration, as we have set it out in the book The Wonders of the Heart, one of the books of The Revival of the Religious Sciences.

To verify it by demonstration is knowledge; to be in that very state is dhawq; and to accept it from hearing and experience, thinking well of those who have it, is faith. These are three degrees:

"God will raise up by degrees those of you who believe and those who have been given knowledge" (Qur'an 58:11).

Behind these stand ignorant people who deny the very foundation of all this. They marvel at such talk, listen to it and mock, and say: "How extraordinary! The nonsense they talk!" Of them God said:

"Among them are some who listen to you, and then, when they have gone out from your presence, say to those who have been given knowledge, 'What was that he said just now?' Those are the ones whose hearts God has sealed, and they follow their own desires"; and so he has made them deaf and blinded their eyes (Qur'an 47:16, 23).

Among the things that became plain to me of necessity from the practice of their way was the true nature of prophecy and what is special to it. Its foundation must be pointed out, so great is the need for it.

The True Nature of Prophecy, and Why All People Need It

Know that the substance of a human being, in his first fitra, was created empty and simple, with no knowledge of any of the worlds of God. Those worlds are many, and no one but God can count them, as he said:

"None knows the armies of your Lord but he" (Qur'an 74:31).

A human being learns of these worlds only through perception, and each of his perceptions was created so that through it he might come to know one world of existing things; and by worlds we mean the kinds of existing things.

The first thing created in a human being is the sense of touch, and through it he perceives certain kinds of things, such as heat and cold, moisture and dryness, softness and roughness, and the like. Touch falls absolutely short of colors and sounds; as far as touch is concerned they might as well not exist.

Then the sense of sight is created for him, and through it he perceives colors and shapes; and that is the widest of the worlds of the senses.

Then hearing is breathed into him, and he hears sounds and melodies.

Then taste is created for him; and so on, until he passes beyond the world of the senses. Then tamyiz, discernment, is created in him, at about the age of seven. That is another stage of his existence, and in it he perceives things beyond the world of the senses, none of which is to be found in the world of sense at all.

Then he rises to another stage, and reason is created for him, and he perceives what is necessary, what is possible and what is impossible, and things not to be found in the stages before it.

Beyond reason there is another stage, in which another eye is opened, by which a person sees the unseen and what is to come in the future, and other things from which reason is barred, just as the power of discernment is barred from perceiving what reason knows, and the power of sense is barred from what discernment perceives. If the things reason perceives were put before a child who has only discernment, he would refuse them and think them far-fetched; in the same way some people of reason have refused the things that prophecy perceives and thought them far-fetched. That is ignorance itself, for they have nothing to rest on but this: it is a stage they have not reached, which does not exist for them, and so they suppose it does not exist in itself. If a man born blind had never learned of colors and shapes from reports passed on by so many people that they could not all be wrong, and they were described to him for the first time, he would not understand them or admit that they exist. God has brought this within reach of his creatures by giving them a sample of what is special to prophecy, and that is sleep: for the sleeper perceives what is to come in the unseen, either plainly or clothed in an image that interpretation lays bare. If a person had not experienced this in himself, and someone told him, "There are people who fall down in a faint like the dead, and their feeling, their hearing and their sight leave them, and then they perceive the unseen," he would deny it and set up a demonstration that it is impossible. He would say: "The powers of sense are the causes of perception. Whoever does not perceive things when those powers are present and working is all the more certain not to perceive them when they lie still." This is a kind of reasoning that existence and observation prove false. Just as reason is one of the stages of a human being, in which he gains an eye that sees the various kinds of things reason knows, while the senses are barred from them, so prophecy too is the name for a stage in which a person gains an eye that has a light, and in its light the unseen appears, and things that reason does not perceive.

Doubt about prophecy may fall on its possibility, or on its existence and actual occurrence, or on its having come to a particular person.

The proof that it is possible is that it exists. The proof that it exists is that there are kinds of knowledge in the world that cannot be imagined to have been reached by reason, such as the science of medicine and the science of the stars. Whoever looks into them knows of necessity that they can be grasped only by inspiration from God and by help given from God's side, and that experience offers no way to them. Some of the astrological rulings concern events that occur only once in every thousand years; how could anyone arrive at them by experience? It is the same with the special properties of medicines. This demonstration shows that it is possible for there to be a way of perceiving these things that reason does not perceive, and that is what is meant by prophecy. Not that prophecy is only that: perceiving this kind of thing, which lies outside what reason perceives, is one of the special properties of prophecy, and it has many others besides. What we have mentioned is a drop from its sea. We mention it only because you have a sample of it with you, namely what you perceive in sleep; and you have with you kinds of knowledge of the same sort in medicine and the science of the stars, and these are miracles of the prophets, peace be upon them, since people of reason have no way to them at all with reason as their only stock in trade.

As for the special properties of prophecy beyond this one, they can be perceived only by dhawq, by traveling the way of Sufism. For you have understood this one only through a sample of it you were granted, namely sleep, and if not for that you would not believe in it. If the Prophet has a special property of which you have no sample, and which you do not understand at all, how can you believe in it? Belief comes only after understanding. That sample is found in the first stages of the Sufi way, and with it comes a kind of dhawq, as far as one has gone, and a kind of belief, by analogy, in what one has not reached. This single special property is enough for you to have faith in the foundation of prophecy.

If you doubt whether a particular person is a prophet or not, certainty can come only from knowing his circumstances, either by seeing them for yourself or by reports passed on by many hands. If you know medicine and jurisprudence, you can recognize jurists and doctors by what you see of their condition and hear of their words, even without ever setting eyes on them. Nor are you unable to know that al-Shafi'i, God have mercy on him, was a jurist, and that Galen, the great physician of the Greeks, was a doctor, and to know it really, not by taqlid of others: you learn a little jurisprudence and medicine and read their books and writings, and then you have a necessary knowledge of what each of them was. In the same way, once you understand what prophecy means, and look long into the Qur'an and the reports of the Prophet, you will gain the necessary knowledge that he, God bless him and give him peace, stood on the highest degree of prophecy. Back that up by testing what he said about acts of worship and their effect on purifying hearts, and how truly he spoke, God bless him and give him peace, when he said:

"Whoever acts on what he knows, God makes him heir to the knowledge of what he does not know."

And how truly he spoke when he said:

"Whoever helps a wrongdoer, God gives that wrongdoer power over him."

And how truly he spoke when he said:

"Whoever rises in the morning with all his cares made into one care, God spares him the cares of this world and the next."

When you have tested this a thousand times, two thousand times, thousands of times, you will gain a necessary knowledge that you cannot dispute.

Seek certainty about prophecy by this road, then, not from a stick turned into a snake or the moon split in two. If you look at that alone, without the countless other signs that go with it, you may well think it sorcery and illusion, and even a means by which God leads people astray, for

"He leads astray whom he wills, and guides whom he wills" (Qur'an 35:8).

Then the questions people raise about miracles will come at you; and if your faith rests on an ordered argument about how a miracle proves what it proves, it will be broken by an ordered argument setting out the difficulties and doubts against it. Let such wonders that break the course of nature be one among the proofs and signs in the whole of your inquiry, until you gain a necessary knowledge whose ground you cannot point to exactly. It is like a man to whom a large number of people report the same news: he cannot point to any one of them and say that his certainty came from that particular man's word; it comes he knows not from where, from the whole of them together and not from any one of them singled out. That is strong faith, the faith that is knowledge.

As for dhawq, it is like seeing with your own eyes and touching with your own hand, and it is found only on the way of the Sufis.

This much of the true nature of prophecy is enough for my present purpose. Why people need it I shall set out next.

Why I Returned to Teaching After Leaving It

When I had kept to solitude and retreat for nearly ten years, it became clear to me in the course of them, of necessity and for reasons I cannot count, sometimes by dhawq, sometimes by demonstrative knowledge and sometimes by the acceptance of faith, that a human being is created with a body and a heart. By the heart I mean the true reality of his spirit, which is the seat of the knowledge of God, not the flesh and blood that a corpse and a beast have as well. The body has a health in which its happiness lies, and a sickness in which its ruin lies; and the heart, likewise, has a health and soundness, and no one is saved "except one who comes to God with a sound heart" (Qur'an 26:89); and it has a sickness in which lies its eternal ruin in the life to come, as God says: "In their hearts is a sickness" (Qur'an 2:10). Ignorance of God is a deadly poison; disobedience to God, in following one's desires, is the disease that makes the heart sick; knowledge of God is its life-giving antidote, and obedience to him, in going against one's desires, is the medicine that heals it. There is no way to treat the heart, by taking away its sickness and bringing it to health, except by medicines, just as there is no way to treat the body except by medicines.

The medicines of the body work to bring health by a special property in them that people of reason cannot grasp with reason as their only stock in trade. In them one must follow, by taqlid, the doctors who took them from the prophets, the prophets who came to know the special properties of things by the special gift of prophecy. In the same way it became clear to me of necessity that the medicines of worship, with the limits and amounts the prophets set and measured for them, work in a way that no reasoning man can grasp with the stock of reason alone. In them one must follow the prophets, who grasped those special properties by the light of prophecy and not by the stock of reason. Medicines are compounded of ingredients that differ in kind and amount, some of them twice others in weight and amount, and the difference in their amounts is not without a secret of the kind that belongs to special properties. In the same way acts of worship, which are the medicines for the disease of hearts, are compounded of actions that differ in kind and amount: the prostration is twice the bowing, and the dawn prayer is half the afternoon prayer in length; and this is not without some secret, of the kind of special properties that can be known only by the light of prophecy. Anyone who has tried to work out a reason for them by way of reason, or supposed that they were laid down at random and not from a divine secret in them that requires them by way of special property, has made himself a great fool and played the ignoramus indeed. And just as medicines have bases that are their main ingredients, and additions that complete them, each with its own particular effect on the working of the bases, so the voluntary prayers and the Prophet's customary practices complete the effects of the main pillars of worship.

In short, the prophets, peace be upon them, are physicians for the diseases of hearts. The use of reason and its work is only to make that known to us, to bear witness to prophecy that it is true and to itself that it is unable to grasp what is grasped by the eye of prophecy, and to take us by the hand and hand us over to prophecy as the blind are handed over to their guides, and the bewildered sick to their caring doctors. Thus far reason can run and walk, and no further; from everything beyond, it is barred, except for understanding what the doctor tells it.

These are things we came to know by a necessity as good as seeing them, in the time of my solitude and retreat.

Then we saw how belief had grown slack, first in the very foundation of prophecy, then in its true nature, then in acting on what prophecy has set out, and we made sure that this was widespread among people. I looked into the causes of people's slackness and their weakness of faith, and found that there are four:

1. A cause coming from those who plunge into the science of philosophy.

2. A cause coming from those who plunge into the way of Sufism.

3. A cause coming from those who claim to stand for ta'lim.

4. A cause coming from the conduct among people of those who bear the name of learning.

For a time I went after people one at a time. I would question anyone who fell short in following the religious Law, ask him what his doubt was and look into his belief and his inner secret, and say to him: "Why do you fall short in it? If you believe in the life to come and do not prepare for it, but sell it for this world, that is folly! You would not sell two things for one, so how can you sell what has no end for a numbered handful of days? And if you do not believe, you are an unbeliever! Take yourself in hand and seek faith, and look into the cause of your hidden unbelief, which is your doctrine inwardly and the cause of your boldness outwardly, though you do not declare it, since you like to dress yourself in faith and take honor from naming the Law!"

One would say: "If this were something one had to keep up, the scholars would be the first to keep it. But so-and-so, one of the famous men among the learned, does not pray; so-and-so drinks wine; so-and-so eats up the funds of religious endowments and the property of orphans; so-and-so lives on the sultan's stipends and does not keep clear of what is forbidden; so-and-so takes bribes for his judgments and his testimony!" And so on, with others like them.

A second claims knowledge of Sufism, and asserts that he has reached a level where he has risen above any need for worship!

A third makes his excuse with some other doubt of the antinomians, the people of ibaha, who hold that the Law no longer binds them!

These are the ones who have strayed from Sufism.

A fourth has met the people of ta'lim, and he says: "The truth is hard to make out, the road to it is difficult and full of disagreement, no school has a better claim than another, the proofs of reason contradict one another, and so there is no trusting the opinion of people who reason; while the one who calls people to ta'lim lays down the law and has no argument. How can I give up certainty for doubt?"

A fifth says: "I do not do this out of taqlid. I have studied the science of philosophy and grasped the true nature of prophecy: it comes down in the end to wisdom and the public good, and the aim of its acts of worship is to keep the common people in check and restrain them from killing one another, quarreling and running loose after their appetites. I am not one of the ignorant common people, that I should put myself under the Law's obligations like a ward under a guardian. I am one of the wise; I follow wisdom, and I see it clearly, and in it I have no need of taqlid!"

That is as far as faith goes in those of them who have studied the philosophy of the Theists, and learned it from the books of Ibn Sina and Abu Nasr al-Farabi. These are the ones who wear Islam as an ornament.

You may well see one of them reading the Qur'an, attending the congregations and the prayers and praising the religious Law with his tongue, and yet for all that he does not give up drinking wine and various kinds of wickedness and depravity! If he is asked, "If prophecy is not true, why do you pray?" he may say: "To exercise the body, and because it is the custom of the town, and to keep my property and my children safe!" Or he may say: "The religious Law is true, and prophecy is real!" Then he is asked, "Then why do you drink wine?" and he says: "Wine was forbidden only because it breeds enmity and hatred, and I am wise enough to guard against that; I drink to sharpen my mind." Ibn Sina himself wrote in a testament of his that he had pledged to God this and that: to honor the ordinances of the religious Law, not to fall short in the acts of worship of religion, and not to drink for amusement, but only as a remedy and for healing. The furthest he got in purity of faith and in keeping to the acts of worship was to make an exception for drinking wine for the sake of his health.

That is the faith of those of them who claim to have faith. A number of people have been deceived by them, and what deceived them all the more was the weakness of those who objected to them, for they objected by attacking geometry and logic and other things that are necessary truths for the philosophers, for the reason we explained earlier.

When I saw the various kinds of people weakened in their faith to this degree by these causes, and saw myself fully equal to exposing this doubt, so that showing these people up was easier to me than a drink of water, because I had plunged so deep into their sciences and their ways, I mean the ways of the Sufis, the philosophers, the people of ta'lim and those who make a show of learning, it struck fire in my soul that this was a duty laid on me at this time, beyond escape. "What good is your solitude and retreat to you," I thought, "when the disease has spread everywhere, the doctors have fallen sick, and mankind stands at the brink of ruin?" Then I said to myself: "When will you take up the work of lifting this gloom and fighting this darkness, in an age of slackness, an era of falsehood? If you set about calling people from their ways to the truth, everyone of this age would turn against you. How will you stand up to them, and how will you live among them? That cannot be done without a favorable time and a religious ruler who has power to enforce."

And so, between myself and God, I allowed myself to keep to my solitude, on the excuse that I was unable to make the truth plain by argument. Then God decreed that the sultan of the day should be moved by an impulse from within himself, not stirred by anyone outside, and he gave a binding command that I go to Nishapur to deal with this slackness. The pressure reached a point where, had I persisted in refusing, it would have ended in a breach between us. Then it came to me that the reason I had given myself for staying away had grown weak. "Your motive for keeping to your retreat must not be laziness and ease, the wish to keep your soul in honor and spare it the harm people do. Why did you allow yourself to escape the hardship of dealing with people, when God, glory be to him, says:

"'In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Alif Lam Mim. Do people suppose that they will be left alone because they say, "We believe," and will not be tested? We tested those who came before them' (Qur'an 29:1-3),

"and when God, mighty and majestic, says to his Messenger, the dearest of all he created:

"'Messengers before you were called liars, and they bore it patiently that they were called liars and harmed, until our help came to them. There is no changing the words of God; and some of the story of the messengers has already come to you' (Qur'an 6:34),

"and when God, mighty and majestic, says: 'In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Ya Sin. By the wise Qur'an,' down to his words, 'You can warn only one who follows the reminder and fears the Merciful, though he cannot see him' (Qur'an 36:1-11)?"

I asked the advice of a number of men of the heart and of direct witnessing, and they agreed in counseling me to leave my retreat and come out of my corner. Added to that were many dreams of righteous men, coming from many sides, bearing witness that this move was the beginning of good and of right guidance, decreed by God at the head of this century. My hope grew firm, and these testimonies made me think well of the move; and God has promised to revive his religion at the head of every century. God made the move to Nishapur easy, to take up this important work, in Dhu'l-Qa'da of the year 499, July 1106. I had left Baghdad in Dhu'l-Qa'da of the year 488, November 1095, and so my retreat had lasted eleven years. This was a move that God decreed, one of the marvels of his decrees, of which there had never been a spark in my heart during this retreat, just as leaving Baghdad and abandoning that life had never once crossed my mind as possible. God turns hearts and states about, and "the heart of the believer is between two of the fingers of the Merciful." I know that though I have returned to spreading knowledge, I have not gone back. To go back is to return to what was. In that time I spread the knowledge by which rank is won, and called people to it by my words and my deeds, and that was my aim and my intention. Now I call people to the knowledge by which rank is given up, and by which its low worth is known.

This is now my intention, my aim and my wish; God knows it of me. I long to set right myself and others, and I do not know whether I will reach what I want or be cut off short of my goal. But I believe, with the faith of certainty and of direct witnessing, that there is no power and no strength except in God, the High, the Mighty; that I did not move; he moved me; that I did not act; he made use of me. I ask him to set me right first, and then to set others right through me; to guide me, and then to guide others through me; to show me the truth as true and grant me to follow it, and show me falsehood as false and grant me to keep clear of it.

Let us return now to the causes of weak faith we mentioned, and set out how such people are to be guided and rescued from what is destroying them.

As for those who claim to be bewildered by what they have heard from the people of ta'lim, their treatment is what we set out in the book The Just Balance, and we will not draw it out by repeating it in this treatise.

As for what the antinomians imagine, we have gathered their doubts under seven heads and exposed them in the book The Alchemy of Happiness.

As for the man whose faith has been corrupted by way of philosophy, until he denies the very foundation of prophecy, we have set out the true nature of prophecy and shown that it exists of necessity, by the proof that there exists a knowledge of the special properties of medicines, of the stars and of other things. It was for this that we put that introduction first; and we drew the proof from the special properties found in medicine and the stars because it comes from their own science. For every scholar of any art, whether the stars, medicine, natural science, magic or the making of talismans, we can show a proof of prophecy drawn from his own science.

As for the man who affirms prophecy with his tongue, and puts the ordinances of the Law on a level with philosophical wisdom, he in truth disbelieves in prophecy. He believes only in a sage who was born under a particular horoscope, whose stars decreed that he would have followers; and that has nothing to do with prophecy. Faith in prophecy is to acknowledge that there is a stage beyond reason in which an eye is opened by which a person perceives particular things that reason is barred from, as hearing is barred from perceiving colors, and sight from perceiving sounds, and all the senses from perceiving what reason knows. If he does not allow that this is possible, we have already set up the demonstration that it is possible, and indeed that it exists. If he does allow it, then he has granted that there are things called special properties, around which the workings of reason do not turn at all; reason all but calls them lies and judges them impossible. A daniq of opium, a sixth of a dirham, half a gram or so, is a deadly poison, because it congeals the blood in the veins by its excessive coldness. The man who claims to know natural science holds that whatever compound cools does so only by the elements of water and earth in it, since those are the two cold elements. Yet it is well known that pounds of water and earth do not cool the inside of the body to anything like that degree. If a natural scientist were told of this and had not tried it, he would say: "This is impossible, and the proof that it is impossible is that opium has something of fire and of air in it, and fire and air do not add to its coldness. Suppose the whole of it were water and earth: even that would not bring about such extreme cooling, and if two hot elements are added to them, it is all the less able to." And he would suppose this to be a demonstration! Most of the philosophers' demonstrations in natural science and metaphysics are built on this kind of thing. They have pictured things according to the measure of what they have found and understood, and whatever they are not used to they have judged impossible. If true dreams were not a familiar thing, and someone claimed that when the senses lie still he knows the unseen, people with minds of this kind would deny it. If someone were asked, "Is it possible that there should be something in the world the size of a grain, which, put down in a town, eats up that whole town and then eats itself, so that nothing is left of the town and what is in it, and nothing is left of the thing itself?" he would say: "That is impossible; it is one of those old wives' tales!" Yet that is what fire is, and someone who had never seen fire would deny it if he heard it described. Most of the denial of the marvels of the life to come is of this kind. We say to the natural scientist: "You have been forced to say that opium has a special property of cooling that does not follow the measure of what is understood about nature. Why should it not be possible that the ordinances of the Law have special properties for healing hearts and purifying them that cannot be grasped by rational philosophy, but can be seen only by the eye of prophecy?"

Indeed, they have acknowledged special properties more marvelous than this in what they put into their books. Among them is a marvelous property, proved by experience, for treating a pregnant woman whose labor is hard. It is this figure, a square of nine numbers, written both in digits and in letters, for in the old order of the Arabic alphabet called abjad each letter also stands for a number: alif for 1, ba for 2, jim for 3, dal for 4, ha for 5, waw for 6, zay for 7, a second, harder ha for 8, and ta for 9.

It is written on two pieces of cloth that no water has touched, and the pregnant woman looks at them with her own eyes and puts them under her feet, and at once the child hurries to come out. They have acknowledged that this is possible and put it into The Wonders of Special Properties. It is a figure of nine squares, with particular numbers written in them, so that the total in any one line is fifteen, whether you read it down the figure, across it or along the diagonal.

I wish I knew how anyone can believe that, and yet his reason is not wide enough to believe that the rak'as, the rounds of bowing and prostration that make up a prayer, are set at two for the dawn prayer, four for the noon prayer and three for the sunset prayer because of special properties that philosophical inquiry cannot know, their cause being the difference between these times. These special properties can be perceived only by the light of prophecy. And the wonder of it is that if we changed the words into the words of the astrologers, they would understand the difference between these times. We would say: "Is the judgment not different according to whether the sun is in the middle of the sky, or rising, or setting?" On this they build, in their calculations of a man's course, the differences in treatment and the variations in lifetimes and in appointed hours of death; and there is no difference between the sun's turning past noon and its being in the middle of the sky, nor between sunset and the sun's being at the point of setting. What reason does anyone have to believe this, except that he hears it in the words of an astrologer, whom he has perhaps caught lying a hundred times? And still he goes back to believing him, so that if the astrologer told him, "When the sun is in the middle of the sky, and such-and-such a planet is in aspect with it, and the rising sign is such-and-such a sign, and you put on a new garment at that time, you will be killed in that garment!", he would not put on the garment at that time, and might suffer bitter cold for it, though he heard it from an astrologer whose lies he has found out many times!

I wish I knew how anyone whose reason is wide enough to accept these strange things, and who is forced to admit that they are special properties, the knowledge of which was a miracle granted to certain prophets, can deny the like of it when he hears it from a truthful prophet, supported by miracles, who was never known to lie! Why is his reason not wide enough to allow that it is possible?

If a philosopher denies that such special properties are possible in the number of rak'as in a prayer, in the stoning of the pillars at Mina during the pilgrimage, in the number of the pilgrimage's essential rites, and in the other acts of worship of the Law, he will find no difference at all between them and the special properties of medicines and the stars. If he says, "I have tried something of the stars and something of medicine, and found some of it true, so that belief in it was kindled in me, and its strangeness and the aversion I felt to it fell away from my heart; but this I have not tried, so how am I to know that it exists and is real?", granting all the while that it is possible, I say: "You do not limit yourself to believing what you have tried. You have heard the reports of those who tried things, and you have followed them by taqlid. Listen, then, to the words of the prophets, for they have tried and have witnessed the truth in everything the Law brought; and travel their road, and you will perceive some of it by direct witnessing."

What is more, I say: "Even if you have not tried it, your reason judges that you are bound, beyond question, to believe it and follow it. Suppose a man has come of age and of sound mind, and has never known illness, and falls ill. He has a father who loves him and is skilled in medicine, and whom he has heard claiming a knowledge of medicine ever since he was old enough to understand. His father mixes him a medicine and says, 'This is right for your illness and will cure you of your sickness.' What does his reason require, if the medicine is bitter and foul to the taste: that he take it? Or that he call it a lie and say, 'I do not see how this medicine is suited to producing a cure, and I have not tried it'? No doubt you would think him a fool if he did that! In the same way the people of insight think you a fool for hanging back!" If you say, "And how am I to know the Prophet's love for us, God bless him and give him peace, and his knowledge of this medicine?", I say: "And how did you know your father's love? It is not something the senses perceive. You knew it from the evidence of his circumstances and the witness of his deeds, in all his comings and goings, with a necessary knowledge that you cannot dispute."

Whoever looks at the sayings of the Messenger of God, God bless him and give him peace, and at the reports that have come down of his care to guide people, and of the gentleness with which he drew them by every kind of kindness and tact to better their characters and make peace among themselves, and in short to everything that sets right their religion and their life in this world, will gain a necessary knowledge that his love for his community, God bless him and give him peace, was greater than a father's love for his child.

And when he looks at the marvels of the deeds that appeared at his hands, and at the marvels of the unseen that the Qur'an told on his tongue and that he told in the reports, and at what he said of the last days, and saw it come to pass as he said, he will know with a necessary knowledge that he had reached the stage beyond reason, and that the eye had opened for him through which the unseen is unveiled, which only the elect perceive, and the things that reason does not perceive.

That is the method for gaining a necessary knowledge of the truth of the Prophet, God bless him and give him peace. Try it, then: reflect on the Qur'an and read the reports, and you will know it as clearly as if you saw it.

This much is enough to rouse the would-be philosophers, and we have set it down because the need for it is so great in this age.

As for the fourth cause, the weakening of faith because of the conduct of scholars, this disease is treated by three things.

The first is that you say: "The scholar you claim eats what is forbidden knows that it is forbidden just as you know that wine and pork and usury are forbidden, and indeed that slander, lying and tale-bearing are forbidden; and you know that, and do it, not because you do not believe it is a sin but because your appetite gets the better of you. His appetite is like yours, and it has got the better of him as it has of you. His knowledge of questions beyond this, which sets him apart from you, does not bring with it any greater restraint from this particular forbidden thing.

"How many a man believes in medicine and yet cannot keep away from fruit and cold water, though his doctor has forbidden them to him! That does not show that they are not harmful, or that his belief in medicine is not sound. That is how the slips of scholars should be taken."

The second is that the common man should be told: "You should believe that the scholar has taken his knowledge as a store laid up for himself in the life to come, and supposes that his knowledge will save him and intercede for him, so that he grows lax in his deeds because of the merit of his knowledge. And though it may be that his knowledge will be all the more evidence against him, it may also be that it will raise him a degree higher, and that is possible. Even if he gives up the deeds, he can still point to the knowledge. But you, common man, if you look at him and give up the deeds, being empty of knowledge, will perish by your bad deeds, and there will be no one to intercede for you!"

The third, and this is the real truth of it, is that the true scholar commits no sin except as a slip, and never persists in sins at all. For true knowledge is the knowledge that teaches that sin is a deadly poison, and that the life to come is better than this world; and whoever knows that will not sell what is better for what is lower.

This knowledge is not gained by the kinds of science that most people busy themselves with. That is why that science only makes them bolder in disobeying God. True knowledge increases in the one who has it awe and fear and hope, and that stands between him and sins, except for the slips that no human being is free of in moments of weakness, and these are no sign of weak faith. "The believer is often tried and often repents," and he is far from persisting in sin and staying bent over it.

This is what I wished to set out in condemnation of philosophy and ta'lim, of their dangers, and of the dangers of those who attack them in the wrong way.

We ask God, the Mighty, to make us among those he has chosen and drawn near, guided to the truth and led along it; whom he has inspired to remember him so that they never forget him; whom he has guarded from the evil of their own selves so that they prefer nothing to him; and whom he has taken wholly for himself so that they worship no one but him.

And may God bless our master Muhammad, and his family and his Companions, and give them peace.