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The_Savior_from_Spiritual_Error, page : 65
various types of soul and the method of moderating and controlling them.
This they borrow from the teaching of the mystics, those men of piety
whose chief occupation is to meditate upon Allah, to oppose the passions,
and to walk in the way leading to Allah by withdrawing from worldly
pleasure. In their spiritual warfare they have learned about the virtues and
vices of the soul and the defects in its actions, and what they have learned
they have clearly expressed. The philosophers have taken over this
teaching and mingled it with their own disquisitions, furtively using this
embellishment to sell their rubbishy wares more readily. Assuredly there
was in the age of the philosophers, as indeed there is in every age, a group
of those godly men, of whom Allah never uncovers the world. They are the
pillars of the earth, and by their blessings mercy comes down on the people
of the earth, as we read in the Prophetic Statement where Muhammad,
peace be upon him, says: “Through them you receive rain, through them
you receive sustenance; of their number were the men of the Cave”. And
these, as the Koran declares, existed in early times (cp. Surah 18).
This they borrow from the teaching of the mystics, those men of piety
whose chief occupation is to meditate upon Allah, to oppose the passions,
and to walk in the way leading to Allah by withdrawing from worldly
pleasure. In their spiritual warfare they have learned about the virtues and
vices of the soul and the defects in its actions, and what they have learned
they have clearly expressed. The philosophers have taken over this
teaching and mingled it with their own disquisitions, furtively using this
embellishment to sell their rubbishy wares more readily. Assuredly there
was in the age of the philosophers, as indeed there is in every age, a group
of those godly men, of whom Allah never uncovers the world. They are the
pillars of the earth, and by their blessings mercy comes down on the people
of the earth, as we read in the Prophetic Statement where Muhammad,
peace be upon him, says: “Through them you receive rain, through them
you receive sustenance; of their number were the men of the Cave”. And
these, as the Koran declares, existed in early times (cp. Surah 18).