the attributes, insisting that if we were to affirm them He would forfeit His status as the First. Yet they have adduced no proof that He is First in the sense they imagine, just as they have furnished no evidence that He is the Necessary Existent in the sense they allege. Instead, they employ imprecise, equivocal terminology that can bear both a true and a false meaning.

It is, however, a matter of plain knowledge that Allah is necessarily existent in and of Himself, self-subsisting; that He is the First, before whom nothing exists; and that He is the Eternal without beginning or end. These people, by contrast, take necessity of existence to mean that He is not related to anything else and therefore cannot possess attributes, and they interpret His priority as analogous to the first numeral, which allows for no plurality. Yet it is evident that the purely abstract “one” or “first,” stripped of every qualification, exists only in the mind, not in external reality.

The mind can conceive of one, two, three, four, and the remainder of the abstract numbers, but number divorced from the things numbered exists solely in thought, never outside it. What exists in the external world is made up of concrete entities subsisting in themselves together with the attributes inherent in them; and the first of those entities is a being characterized by its own attributes. Such a being, they maintain, is not found in actual existence: it is neither an entity subsisting in itself nor an attribute that subsists in something else, but