—without end, and the early generations who affirmed (1) Allah’s knowledge and power never intended by that what these later theologians seek to prove, namely that His knowledge admits of no parts whatsoever. On the contrary, they openly declared that a person may grasp some portion of Allah’s knowledge while remaining ignorant of another. Anyone who refused to concur with them in the claim they advanced—the negation of divisibility over which they disputed (2)—such as their opponents from the Murjiʾah (3), the Shīʿah, the Karrāmiyyah, and others, likewise dissented on this very point; the same is true of the broad community of ḥadith scholars, jurists, and Sufis.

Now this argument on which the Imam of their school and its spokesman, Qāḍī Abū Bakr, relies—that the unity of divine knowledge can be established only by the consensus he alleges—shows you that reason itself contains nothing that precludes a plurality of Allah’s knowledge, power, speech, or any of His other attributes. Abū al-Maʿālī, al-Rāzī, and other sharp-witted figures among them admitted as much. Although Ibn Fūrak’s words might suggest that reason requires those attributes to be one, we have already demonstrated the unsoundness of that notion.

Seventy-first point:
Their later imām, Abū ʿAbd-Allāh al-Rāzī, acknowledged in his most prestigious works (4) that to equate a request (5) with a declarative statement is untenable on the assumption that the ḥāl (state) is denied (6)—and the denial of ḥāl is precisely the doctrine of al-Ashʿarī himself and of their leading scholars (7)