for each of its parts would be something other than it, and whatever is in need of something outside itself can never be self-existent, eternal and without beginning, as these matters have been explained in detail elsewhere.

Among those who speak on the subject there is a group that, in both affirmation and negation, confines itself strictly to Qurʾanic and Prophetic wording. Just as they will not say, “He is a body or a substance,” they likewise will not say, “He is not a body and not a substance.”

A second group does employ such philosophical terms; within it some deny them while others affirm them. Either faction may introduce ideas that agree with the revealed law, and either may introduce notions that contradict it.

Both camps claim to be following rational or linguistic inquiry, and some of them even cling to what they imagine to be a scriptural proof. In most cases, however, they do not actually base themselves on any revealed text, for none exists on the point. Instead, they labor to alter the very language with which the Messenger was sent and then force his words to carry the new meanings they have devised—just as the Christians did when they bent the language of the prophets to their own innovations.

The prophets never called Allah’s knowledge and life a “son,” a “holy spirit,” or a “lord,” yet the Christians coined those very names for His knowledge and life and then read the prophets’ statements as though they endorsed them.

In the same way, a group of scholastic theologians—whom the early generations called the Jahmiyyah—introduced new definitions of the terms “One” (wāḥid), “Unique” (aḥad), and the like, applying them to something that cannot be pointed at, nor can the senses distinguish anything within it.