By “other” one may mean

(1) something distinct and separate; in that sense, the attribute of the subject, or any part of him, is not included in the word “other.” One may also mean by it that whose concept can be formed without having to conceive of the thing to which it is “other”; in this technical usage it is therefore deemed “other.”

Because of this, speculative theologians have disagreed about the referent of the term “other.” The disagreement is verbal, yet it has generated doubts in questions concerning the divine attributes that can be resolved only by recognizing the shared and ambiguous senses carried by such expressions, as has been discussed elsewhere.²

For that reason a distinction is drawn between the statement, “The attributes are other than the Essence,” and the statement, “The attributes of God are other than God.” The latter is false, for the referent of the name “Allah” includes His attributes, whereas the referent of the word “essence” does not. Accordingly, one does not say, “The attributes of God are something additional to Him—exalted is He,” although one may say, “The attributes are additional to the essence,” meaning that they are additional to what certain affirmers have posited as a bare, attribute-less essence.³

God, exalted is He, is the Essence described by His inseparable attributes. The name “Allah” never applies to an essence stripped of attributes, and such a thing cannot possibly exist. Hence Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal—may Allah have mercy on him—said in his debate with the Jahmites: “We do not say, ‘Allah and His knowledge, Allah and His power, Allah and His light’; rather, we say: ‘Allah, by His knowledge, His power, and His light, is one God.’”⁴

The matter has been treated at length elsewhere.

As for people’s saying, “I ask you by Allah and by the bond of kinship,” and the Qurʾānic reading that renders, “through whom you ask one another, and the womb-relations,”⁵ this falls under the heading of taking that bond as a causal means, for kinship