And with this, Sheikh Abu Hamid al-Ghazali gave a legal opinion (fatwa) in his response to one of the questioners: “And you have ascended with your question a difficult ascent, below whose heights the eyes of the onlookers fall short, and you have knocked on a closed door that is not opened except to the firmly grounded scholars. Furthermore, not every secret is uncovered and disclosed, and not every reality is presented and manifested; rather, the chests of the free are the graves of secrets.” And Al-Ghazali adds, citing:

“Some of the gnostics said: 'Disclosing the secret of Lordship is disbelief (kufr).' Rather, the Master of the First and the Last, Muhammad—His might was mighty—said: 'Indeed, some knowledge is like the form of the hidden; none knows it except the scholars of Allah, and when they speak of it, none denies it except the people of delusion regarding Allah.'” And no matter how numerous the people of delusion become, it is obligatory to safeguard the secrets by way of concealment—[Mishkat al-Anwar], Cairo edition. And there came in this book also: “And regarding the like of these certain interpretations, many of the philosophers among the predecessors and the successors advised to veil them from the common people, just as the great philosopher Ibn Rushd did, and he clarified that.”

That is in the book of [Fasl al-Maqal] [The Decisive Treatise], edited by Dr. George Fadlo Hourani, Leiden / 1959 / page 32 and what follows it; he said: “The people with respect to the Sharia are of three categories: a category that is not among the people of interpretation at all, and they are the rhetorical ones who constitute the overwhelming majority, and that is because there is no one of sound mind who is devoid of this type of assent;