Late in the ninth century CE, the great physician, chemist and philosopher, Muhammad ibn Zakaria al-Razi, launched a scathing attack on the pietist ideological foundations of the world he lived in. “All men being by their nature equal,” he argued in his magnum opus, Fi Nekdh al-Adyan, or Refutation of Revealed Religions, “the prophets cannot claim any intellectual or spiritual superiority. The miracles of the prophets are impostures or belong to the domain of pious legend.”