المقالة في الرد على المنجمين
In the Creator, who transcends limitation and nonexistence, I have placed my trust; and in the guiding Qāʾim I have sought refuge. The servant al-Muqtanā, tested by the burdens of religion and afflicted by dissension and the apostates’ violence, says: What prompted me to set down this treatise independently, rather than include it in a collected book or another epistle, was the extravagant speech of a person without standing who claimed to possess religious understanding yet showed himself to be obstinate, apostate, and ignorant.
There is also the failure of the learned in the age of concealment, before the appearance of the Qāʾim of religion. They excused their own weakness and abandoned the doctrines and rules they had adopted for replying to the people of Truth. Certain disputants and would-be philosophers agreed with the people of Truth that the soul is a subtle, transparent substance, enduring through its essential perfection. Yet they then declared that this substance bears accidents within its essence and identity, and made every kind of knowledge an accident borne by the souls of creatures. They did not distinguish the soul of a truthful, pure, obedient, knowledgeable Unitarian from that of a wicked, treacherous, oppressive and unjust apostate.
It is as though these people looked upon truth with eyes whose souls had become accustomed to repetition in confusion and opposition. They made no distinction between souls whose substance is illuminated by the radiance of Intellect and its sacred lights, and clouded souls that have turned away from Truth toward base teachings and the darkness of nature.
The latter are the souls that turned back from the unity of the Creator and doubted the just, guiding Qāʾim and Imam. Their learning became mere accidents because they turned away from the living power of Intellect and became attached to the usages of devils and rebellious spirits, departing from Truth in both branch and root. This is not the same as granting an intellect to people who openly show foolishness, obstinacy, apostasy, and ignorance. The wisdom of the awaited Qāʾim, the guiding Imam of unity, exposes their incapacity in the cycle of Resurrection and reveals the hidden vices of the accursed Opponent. The Opponent’s concealment is explained through a comparison: he is subtle and transparent in relation to his own coarse followers, just as his influence flows among them like blood; but compared with the light of Intellect, he is darkness, and compared with Intellect's subtlety, he is dense. How can such people possess intellects when ignorance has made the reprehensible qualities of the Opponent master over them: disobedience, darkness, arrogance, ignorance, and stubborn resistance?
These are the qualities of punishment, the blameworthy dispositions opposed to Truth. By contrast, the people of unity and Truth are adorned with the known and praiseworthy qualities of Intellect: the warmth of Intellect, the strength of light, the repose of humility, the coolness of forbearance, and the pliability of the underlying matter [hayūlā] that enters their dispositions and issues from them. These are the praiseworthy, recognizable qualities of Intellect.
The world of the Opponent does not possess intellects in this sense. Its members have only a faculty of discrimination by which they can distinguish falsehood from Truth. Yet this faculty and their freedom of choice are enough to establish the case for reward and punishment against every creature. By virtue of their nobility, the souls of the people of Truth have the substantiality of Intellect's four qualities; the souls of those who oppose them are joined to blameworthy qualities such as dullness, wickedness, stubbornness, and ignorance.
If the souls of the world of the Opponent were united with Intellect, they would necessarily have an excellence comparable to the souls of the Unitarians. Creation would then be purposeless and all would be confusion, for Truth and justice would be mixed indiscriminately with oppression, wrongdoing, and frivolity. When some of them display good manners, generosity of character, seemly conduct, or knowledge consistent with the doctrines of unity, Truth, and justice, that does not establish their continuing union with Intellect. Rather, they are souls that have retreated from knowledge and the religion of unity, Truth, and justice, retaining a trace of the noble soul because of some righteous action they performed toward the people of Truth in the beginning and at the origin.
Not everyone who memorizes some religious information, even a great quantity of it, possesses a soul united with Intellect. If he makes it a means of ostentation, reputation, deception, gain, or arrogance toward people of religion and merit, that information does not make him rational in the sense intended here.
Such habits deprive people of the praiseworthy qualities and obligations of tawḥīd, the discipline of religion that precedes its outward practice. These are the excellent virtues in their perfection, which the Most High Creator made the foundation of the religion of unity, Truth, and justice. So too He made the celestial natures, the 'mothers', the basis of bodily growth, the completion of created bodies, and the continuation of generation. If one of those celestial natures were absent from this world, bodies and plants would not develop fully. The ordering of things would become confused, depart from the arrangement of wisdom, and lose its proper form.
The substantial soul likewise reaches its perfection through union with the obligations of unity and with the praiseworthy qualities of the soul, the dispositions of reward by which it can become united with what Intellect bestows. If the soul lacks even one of these praised qualities, which together constitute its perfection, its knowledge becomes confused, its vision of unity is darkened, and its order is corrupted. The principles of its understanding become deficient, and its sciences lose their proper object, mixing seriousness with frivolity. Reprehensible dispositions opposed to Truth and justice gain mastery over it and lead it toward wickedness, oppression, injustice, and ignorance.
A sound witness is the continued existence of a human body through the five members on which its nature and life depend: heart, liver, gallbladder, spleen, and lung. If one of them is lacking, the body disintegrates, perishes, and ceases to follow a sound and orderly condition.
This heedless man's standing does not justify an answer addressed to him as one of the recognized authorities. We have made his words an occasion and a means to reply instead to those logicians and philosophers who consider knowledge one of the accidents. They do not distinguish the spiritual substance united with Intellect and bearing its substantial character from a coarse, corporeal substance that bears accidents because of the corruption of its own essence.
Now, by the Creator's will, I shall expose the defect in the reasoning of those who assign to the inanimate stars the power to issue decrees, to determine good fortune or evil fortune, and to govern and influence the livelihoods of people and their distribution. Whoever asserts this openly contradicts the exalted Creator’s rejection of astrology (ʿilm al-najāma).
Such a person has revealed his error in the face of established prohibitions and exalted commands. He has left the safe path of obedience and openly opposed Truth, denying the signs of the Imamate. By attributing to the stars a genuine rule over people's livelihoods, allotted shares, and recovery from sickness regardless of changes in food, air, causes, or maladies, and over the happiness or misery of souls, as astrologers declare in their books and fantastic pronouncements, he invalidates recompense according to deeds and makes reward and punishment fall away, like the beliefs of ignorant deniers of divine responsibility.
On their reasoning, all people would be excused for every disgraceful thing they did, because the event would have occurred by a heavenly determination arising from the action of the stars, as the astrologers claim.
Their doctrine, meaning that of the philosophers and astrologers in this matter, also abolishes the distinction between souls joined to Intellect and its commands in obligatory worship and souls opposed to them. It would surrender the ordering of the worlds to things lacking intellect, soul, and rational representation: the celestial spheres and the inanimate stars. Nothing could refute them more completely than recognizing that this makes them depart from all the binding judgments of religious obligation.
Whoever accepts this doctrine, or any part of it beyond the stars' natural action in developing material bodies through airs and vegetation and the airs' nourishing of the elemental 'mothers', assigns to the stars an agency that does not belong to them. Whoever attributes another power to them associates a partner with the Creator of created things and disavows the God of earth and heaven.
This is enough for whoever considers the meanings of Truth, deals fairly with himself, and belongs to the people of faith and certainty. Praise belongs to our Lord, the God al-Ḥākim, exalted above action, attribute, boundary, designation, and utterance. Thanks belong to His Guardian and servant, the guide to the religion of Truth, the possessor of favor, excellence, and generous bounty. He suffices His weak captive servant al-Muqtanā, of little strength and power.