they are identical to Him, so He is none other than Himself and no plurality remains. Consequently, they are driven into contradiction—just as the Christians are—because they affirm unity while simultaneously asserting multiplicity. They even recite:

“He worships me and I worship Him;
He praises me and I praise Him.”

These people have constructed their doctrine upon two unsound foundations.

First: they maintain that the concrete essences of contingent things are fixed in non-existence, mirroring the claim advanced by certain scholastic theologians that the nonexistent is a thing truly subsisting in the realm of non-existence. Such a notion is deemed false by the overwhelming majority of rational minds.

In truth, a nonexistent object may be intended for creation, conceived mentally, spoken of, and written down before it actually appears; it therefore enjoys a kind of existence within knowledge, speech, and script, yet in external reality it has no existence whatsoever. Since existence is actual subsistence, it possesses no subsistence in concrete, outside existence; its only subsistence is in knowledge—in other words, the knower apprehends it before it comes into being.

Second: they identify the very existence of the Lord of the worlds—the eternal, primeval Creator, necessarily existent in Himself—with the existence of the created, fashioned, contingent being. As Ibn ʿArabī says: “Whoever understands what we have established concerning numbers, and that their negation is identical to their affirmation, will know that the transcendent Real is the same as creation characterized by likeness. Thus the matter…”