be discussed later, they did not hold back from arrogantly challenging it.

O you who is scrutinizing this book of mine! Know that the service I want to perform with it is this: by demonstrating the straight path of Islam, I want both to repel the doubts of those inimical to religion — who go to one extreme — and to throw their doubts in their faces; and to repulse the misapprehensions of the literalists (zâhirperest) and those who go to the other extreme and deserve the epithet 'fatuous friends' and to show their false notions to be base- less. I want too to help and support the genuine scholars of Islam, and the intelligent and loyal, who guide to the truth and pave the way leading to Islam's good fortune and future, striving with complete certainty of victory.

In Short: My aim is to polish that diamond sword.

If you ask: What is this anxiety of yours? And what need is there to provide proofs (bürhan) for knowledge that is axiomatic? For to advance proofs for questions that have become self-evident through the admixture of ideas and discoveries of the empirical sciences, is to announce what is known.

By way of answer I say this: Regretably, although all those who share with me this slice of time are apparently the children of the thirteenth century, they are in respect of ideas and progress, relics of the Middle Ages. It is as if our contemporaries are the index of the centuries from the end of the third to the thirteenth, or are samples of them, or are a hybrid people. In fact, many self-evident matters of the present, are deemed by them to be delusions.