 Recent material brought to light by Philippe Vallat (2015a, 2015b, 2016) could confirm this interpretation. It would show that al-Rāzī said in debate with a theologian named Abū Qāsim al-Balkhī, also called al-Kaʿbī, that “prophets are unnecessary, because we have reason which suffices, assuming that prophecy is in accordance with reason” (on al-Kaʿbī in general see El Omari 2016; and on their debate Rashed 2000, Shihadeh 2006: 103). It has however been argued that Vallat’s new evidence cannot convincingly be linked to the debate between al-Kaʿbī and al-Rāzī, who is never named in these texts (Adamson 2021: 148–151). A different approach would be to read Abū Ḥātim as having distorted al-Rāzī’s position, which may have been a more targeted attack on schismatic and controversialist groups including the Ismāʿīlī branch of Islam to which Abū Ḥātim belonged. Ismāʿīlism is characterized by its insistence on the need for a religious leader or imām to guide the faithful to a true understanding of Islam. It may have been this doctrine, and not prophecy more generally, that al-Rāzī attacked, as a signal example of the dangers of taqlīd (Mohaghegh 1970: 160–1; Adamson 2021: 147).