To those who teach the recurrence of gods in different human forms: is the God you profess just, or an unjust and oppressive ruler? They will answer that He is just. Then ask them: how is knowledge of Him, and the affirmation of His unity, required of every creature, while He changes from one bodily garment and material person to another? This would itself be injustice.
According to your claims, He establishes Callers and makes them guides to His knowledge; He obliges the creatures to obey the Callers and to answer them in worship and tawḥīd. They direct the people to know Him in a certain person, in a visible bodily form, recognized as a grown man. Yet soon afterward He returns to the condition of a child, and the world is required to learn His identity through upbringing anew. Those who fail to recognize Him in the second person are declared unbelievers. Then you make Him a third, fourth, fifth person, and so on without end. Where is the conclusion or limit to such a teaching?
How can the Creator, exalted be He, be repeated in distinct bodily garments when you reject the doctrine of transmigration held by other religions? You even make the Lord's repeated entry into successive persons a greater kind of transmigration than what you condemn. Your position contradicts itself.
And then you say that when the souls of your own people depart from their bodily forms they are stripped of material heaviness and become subtle spirits. The virtues and good works of their earthly lives draw them near their origin; their evil acts prevent them from reaching their source. You maintain that the soul has no reward except knowledge and no punishment except ignorance.
Heedless ones! How can it acquire knowledge when it no longer has the bodily instruments through which knowledge was acquired? How can ignorance be joined to a spirit that has left behind its sensible faculties? How can the subtle spirits enjoy delight in their own immateriality, and in what way do they abide near their origin, recognizing it and experiencing their rewards?
You may say that the soul sees in dreams and relates what it has seen, and that dream-visions prove its ability to perceive without bodily instruments. Yet we have never found it perceive the objects it dreams of without its natural bodily constitution and the images first obtained through that constitution. Animals, too, see things in dreams, just as human beings do. What empty intellects and feeble arguments these are!
You maintain also that the world is never empty of human beings. Whenever a generation passes, another arises, and thus the world remains populated through all ages. Yet you reject the teaching of the transmigrationists and those who believe in an eternally repeating world, who say that the succession of humanity resembles the succession of plants. Do you not see the likeness of the very position you condemn?
Tell us, teachers of abstraction: where do the powers that leave human bodies go, and where do they remain? If you say they linger between earth and heaven, their number over the ages would fill that region and mingle with the air. The changing natures of that world and its corruption would then act upon them as they do upon other things. If you move their permanent abode above the heaven, they must fill that expanse as well. What is their condition while ascending there? Are they substances or air, and what carries and preserves them?
If you answer that the souls remain fixed near their first source, gazing upon it and receiving their satisfaction from knowing it, explain why they ever left it. By your account they could receive no delight, advantage or increase except from the very origin they abandoned. What compelled a part to separate from its source and share the indignity of natural existence, only to return to seek conjunction with what it had left? Why would the source send them forth ignorant if its own nature is perfect knowledge?
Perhaps you say that the spirits join the natural world in order to become perfected by knowledge, like iron that acquires a polished brightness. But iron and other polished material objects never cease to depend upon their constitution, their material and the work that shapes them. We have not seen a created substance that stands entirely through itself, needing nothing. Your analogy fails to prove the immaterial self-sufficiency you assert. You have driven likeness and false resemblance into the doctrine that claims to free the Creator from likeness.
People bereft of resolution! Why do you make the Worshipped One repeat His appearance in bodily garments through years and generations, and oblige His existence to depend upon material forms, while you declare your own souls capable of existing without such forms? You confine the Creator to an instrument while freeing the servant from instruments. On your account, the divine presence must never leave the world for even the blink of an eye, lest the proof to creation disappear; yet your souls have no need of the bodies through which they learned in the first place. Which of these contradictory claims will you defend?
Explain how knowledge could be acquired without an instrument. If you say that souls need no instrument, why did they leave their source and enter the natural world? If you say that they came there to learn, you must assume they left the source of knowledge in a state of ignorance. An origin that is itself knowing should not produce from itself an ignorant emanation, if your account of their unity is correct. But if you insist that the soul comes already knowing and has no need for further teaching, then it has been made equal to its source, and there is nothing left for it to gain.
You have said that the greatest pleasure of the soul is to behold its source, because the source bestows blessings and good upon it. Yet you also call the soul independent of the source and in need of nothing. Tell us, people of equity, which of these assertions is the one on which you rely. Does a soul need its source and receive something from it, or is it self-sufficient and equal to the source?
You maintain further that ignorant and disobedient souls leave their bodies and rise toward the Originator, but the sphere prevents them from reaching Him. They are forced to remain between earth and heaven, suffering the burning heat of the sun and the cold of night as punishment. This is a fabricated doctrine. If soul belongs to a world outside nature, how can the accidents of the natural world bring it pain or pleasure?
If you insist that heat and cold torment the departed soul, it follows that the original source from which the souls came—placed by you above the sphere, nearer the causes of heat and cold—should suffer even more. If you exempt that source from thermal change, you have conceded that the thing of which these souls are said to be a part is not subject to the punishment that you attribute to them. Explain, then, the actual means by which the obedient souls are rewarded and the disobedient punished.
If an answer eludes you, acknowledge your ignorance. Do not claim knowledge you lack. Someone who asserts a doctrine without evidence merely exhausts his faculties and finds no sound result. Truth cannot be located in mutually contradictory valleys. It has one direction, a clear tongue and a profitable teaching. Genuine proof exposes a lying pretender. Its justice is firm and its advantage evident; falsehood has neither stability nor guiding light.
Do not become the prey of the false Pharaohs and those who misleadingly adorn the religious path. Whoever accepts his religion through hearsay, follows those who oppose the truth, and submits to the devils will be trapped within ever narrower passages until he can find no way forward. But anyone who wants rescue and the spring of life should follow the evident road and the sincere guide. The guide seeks no payment or material recompense for conveying the message. He passes on the trust and the Call as commanded; his Creator made him a door for the willing, a guide for those who answer, a summons to the unity of the Lord of the worlds, an awakener of the heedless, and an Imam for the discerning.
Whoever knows him receives good things, becomes joined to rational benefits, and has the delusive kinds of knowledge removed from his heart—the notions that corrupt spiritual forms and attach the soul to the world of animals. We ask our Lord for His mercy, to keep us from the conduct of sinners and associators, through His power. He embraces the nations in His knowledge and His forbearance. He suffices me; the Qāʾim is my confidence and trust, and that suffices.