Thus the true servants of Allah—those who worship none but Him—stand apart from anyone who worships something else alongside Him and commits shirk, or from those who, citing an all-embracing divine decree, treat believers and unbelievers as equals, just as the pagan Arabs once did. For that reason the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, “It is a declaration of dissociation from idolatry.”

Surah “Say: He is Allah, One” affirms the Divine Essence together with the Names and Attributes that mark off those who acknowledge the Creator-Lord—the One, the Eternal Refuge—from the genuine negators who deny His Names and Attributes, resembling Pharaoh and his likes in their open rejection of the Worshipped Deity, even though inwardly they acknowledge Him. The Exalted says, “They denied them, though their souls were convinced of them, out of injustice and arrogance” (Q 27:14); and Moses said, “You know well that none has sent down these signs except the Lord of the heavens and the earth as clear proofs, and indeed, O Pharaoh, I think you are doomed” (Q 17:102).

Allah, mighty and sublime, sent His prophets with detailed affirmation and concise negation: they affirmed His Names and Attributes while denying any likeness between Him and His creation. Those who opposed them—among the negationists, philosophers, and others—reversed the matter. They offered elaborate negation but only a vague, generic affirmation, repeatedly asserting: “He is not this, not that, not the other.” When they wished to affirm something, they would say, “absolute existence, on the condition of negating all qualities,” or “absolute existence, on the condition of sheer abstraction,” and they are—