He and others among the scholastic theologians—those of the Muʿtazilah and the Ashʿarīs who followed them—advance statements whose logic would oblige them to adopt the doctrine of the pantheistic ittihādiyyah. For he says: “He is Absolute Being,” and they describe Him (1) only with negative attributes that can apply solely to what does not exist, just like the absolute, universal existence that has no external reality. Yet the logical consequence of a person’s words is not identical to what he actually intended.

To clarify the issue: these thinkers both affirm and negate the Creator, both acknowledge and deny Him. They do not admit that He is identical with the existence of created things, whereas those ittihādiyyah, despite their contradictions, explicitly declared that He is the very existence of the creatures.

What concerns us here is this: although division and partition are impossible for the Creator, exalted be He, their statement, “He is One and has no parts,” means—according to them—that He is a single entity, distinct from everything else, existent, and indivisible. Were that so, [His speech would be a single, uniform meaning] (2). Indeed, one of their principles is that the speech of Allah is a real entity subsisting in the Speaker, neither composite nor divisible; that is, none of it is command, none of it prohibition, and none of it report in such a way that one differs from the other. Rather, what is command is (3) at the same time prohibition and report. In their view, the Creator is a single entity—that is, not a body composed of parts—while one of these two categories is not of the same genus as the other. One can only argue (4) from the negation of this partition that (5) if part of the speech were to subsist in one part of the subject and another part in another, then negating the divisibility of the subject would necessitate negating the divisibility of the attribute subsisting in it. Yet once it is said that speech consists of distinct realities, each reality subsists in the subject.