in the first place; rather, it would be no more than a hypothetical form of speech, just as a person who knows God’s oneness may entertain in his mind the doctrine of the dualists (1) without that conflicting with his certainty of divine unity. Were such a notion an actual belief, it would indeed negate that certainty. Once it is established that knowledge points to a truthful report, then whenever the report corresponds truthfully to the matter reported, the very supposition of a false report alongside the pre-eternal speech is impossible, for no new speech ever comes into being.

He said (2): If it is objected, “Since it is possible for a single utterance to be, from one perspective, a command and, from another, a prohibition, should it not likewise be possible for it to be, from one perspective, true and, from another, false?”

We reply: In reality a command (3) is itself a prohibition, for commanding a thing is a prohibition of its opposite, and whoever commands a thing is, by that very act, forbidding its contrary—there is no contradiction in this. By contrast, it is impossible for truth to be false in any respect. The relationship of a statement to the matter it conveys is like the relationship of knowledge to the thing known: when knowledge is attached to the existence of a thing, it cannot at that same moment be knowledge of its non-existence.

Abū al-Maʿālī said in his well-known work al-Irshād (4)—the “Psalter” of his later followers—just as al-Ghurar and Taṣaffuḥ al-Adillah by Abū al-Ḥusayn (5) are the Psalter