or to say: it is neither this nor that, or to say: “in one respect it is this, and in another respect it is that” (1).

These are merely verbal disputes; each party adopts whatever wording it prefers. Quarrelling over terms that are not sanctioned by the sharia is of no use to us—the point is the meaning. Yes, when the wording is scriptural we are commanded to preserve its precise definition, as the Exalted says,

“The Bedouins are the worst in disbelief and hypocrisy, and most likely not to know the limits of what Allah has revealed to His Messenger” (2).

Given this, it is clear that your statement that “a proof both affirms its pre-eternity and prevents it from being multiple or varied” is a bare claim with no reality behind it.

Forty-first angle: You say that it is “unlike the speech of created beings.” We answer: Its being unlike created speech does not license what reason knows to be impossible, such as the union of two contradictories. The notion that a single, undifferentiated entity could at the same time be distinct realities is self-evidently false, and the fact that Allah’s attribute differs from the attributes of creatures does not render this impossibility acceptable.

Forty-second angle: You say that it is “unlike the speech of created beings.” If by this you mean that the reality of Allah’s speech is not like the reality of created speech—just as He Himself and all His other attributes are unlike those of the creation—then this is true; but it avails you nothing. For its being so does not require us to affirm what the intellect knows to be non-existent: whatever the intellect recognises as impossible cannot be affirmed, whether in the seen world or the unseen. And the idea that a single reality in which there is no differentiation