Like his predecessors, Abd ar-Razzaq divides men into classes according to their insight into divine things. The first is of men of the world, who are ruled by the flesh (_nafs_) and who live careless of all religion. The second is of men of reason (_aql_). They through the reason contemplate God, but see only His external attributes. The third is of men of the spirit (_ruh_) who, in ecstasy, see God face to face in His very essence, which is the substrate of all creation. In his cosmogony, Abd ar-Razzaq follows, of course, the neo-Platonic model and shows great ingenuity in weaving into it the crude and materialistic phrases and ideas of the Qur’an. Like all Muslim thinkers he displays an anxiety to square with his philosophy the terms dear to the multitude. [Sidenote: IBN TAYMIYA] To Ibn Taymiya all this was the very abomination of desolation itself. He had no use for mystics, philosophers, Ash‘arite theologians, or, in fact, for anyone except himself. A contemporary described him as a man most able and learned in many sciences, but with a screw loose. However it may have been about the last point, there can be no question that he was the reviver for his time and the transmitter to our time of the genuine Hanbalite tradition, and that his work rendered possible the Wahhabites and the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi. He was the champion of the religion of the multitude as opposed to that of the educated few with which we have been dealing so long. This popular theology had been going steadily upon its way and producing its regular riots and disputings. It is related of a certain Ash‘arite doctor, Fakhr ad-Din ibn Asakir (d. 620), that, in Damascus, he never dared to pass by a certain way through fear of Hanbalite violence. The same Fakhr ad-Din once gave, as in duty bound, the normal salutation of the Peace to a Hanbalite theologian. The Hanbalite did not return it, which was more than a breach of courtesy, and indicated that he did not regard Fakhr ad-Din as a Muslim. When people remonstrated with him, he turned it as a theological jest and replied, “That man believes in ‘Speech in the Mind’ (_kalam nafsi, hadith fi-n-nafs_), so I returned his salutation mentally.” The point is a hit at the Ash‘arites, who contended that thought was a kind of speech without letters or sounds, and that God’s quality of Speech could therefore be without letters or sounds.