—one of them, and the most adroit among them in promoting the doctrine of ontological union—when the Fuṣūṣ was read in his presence and he was told, “The Qur’an contradicts your Fuṣūṣ,” retorted: “The entire Qur’an is polytheism; true monotheism is found only in our discourse.”

He was then asked, “If being is truly one, why is a wife lawful while a sister is unlawful?” He answered, “Everything is lawful in our view, but these veiled people declared it unlawful, so we said: It is unlawful for you.”

[Critique of the doctrine of the oneness of being]

This, in addition to his flagrant unbelief, is a manifest contradiction; for if existence is one, who is the veiled and who is the one doing the veiling?

Accordingly, one of their shaykhs said to his disciple, “Whoever tells you that there is anything in the universe other than Allah has lied.” The disciple replied, “Then who is the liar?”

They said to another, “These are merely manifestations.” He responded, “Are the manifestations other than that which manifests, or are they the same? If they are other, you have posited relativity; if they are the same, there is no distinction.”

We have laid bare the secrets of these people elsewhere and clarified the real meaning of each one’s statements. The author of the Fuṣūṣ, for instance, says that the nonexistent is ‘something,’ and that the Being of the Truth overflows upon both existent and nonexistent, thus distinguishing between existence (wujūd) and fixity (thubūt).

The Muʿtazila, who said that the nonexistent is an entity established outside the mind, though misguided, are still better than he is; for they maintained that the Lord created for those things, fixed in non-existence, an existence that is not the Lord’s own. This man, however, claims that the very existence of the Lord overflowed upon them, so that, in his view, there is no existence at all apart from Him.