and they recite:

“No solitary being has ever affirmed the One,
for anyone who claims His tawḥīd (monotheism) is a denier.
The tawḥīd voiced by one who speaks of His attributes
is a borrowed cloak the One Himself has cast aside.
His tawḥīd of Himself alone is true tawḥīd,
and whoever describes Him slips into heresy.”

Such talk belongs to the same species as the saying of those who regard the human spirit as pre-eternal and everlasting, declaring, “It is an attribute of Allah.” In doing so they turn half of a person into divinity and the other half into humanity, though the “divinity” they mean is merely his own spirit, not a single divinity in the sense asserted by the Christians. According to their view, when taken together with the Christians’ claim, there would be in the Messiah and others alleged to embody a union of divinity two distinct “divinities”: his own spirit would be one divinity, and the Word would be a second.

Of the same stripe are those who chant verses said to have been recited by al-Ḥallāj:

“Glory be to Him whose humanity unveiled
the secret of His blazing divine light;
then He appeared openly among His creatures
in the form of one who eats and drinks,
so that His creation beheld Him
as an eyebrow beholds the eyebrow facing it.”

Even if one were to suppose that his very soul was the same soul that existed before the world came to be, this would still not prove that he is Allah or that he is one of Allah’s attributes. Rather, when someone claims that his own spirit existed at that time—meaning precisely his spirit—that interpretation would be more plausible than the Christians’ claim. In sum, whatever is reported about the Messiah’s having existed before the world, in a certain sense acknowledged by the People of the Book, is paralleled by what is narrated from Solomon, who said, “I existed before the world existed.” Then it has been established