Abū Bakr, he holds that He is everlasting without an attribute of everlastingness. Abū Yaʿlā, Abū al-Maʿālī, and others agreed with him on this.

For them, the second category includes such attributes as being living, knowing, and powerful, and the like.

This is not the place to discuss at length their division of inseparable attributes into essential and qualitative attributes. By “essential,” they did not mean whatever is inseparable from the essence, since all these attributes are inseparable from it. Nor did they mean “constitutive of the essence,” as in the terminology of the logicians. For they do not hold that any essences are composed of attributes, such as genus and differentia. Nor do they divide attributes into those that are constitutive, internal to the quiddity and part of it, and those that are accidental, external to it and not constitutive. Rather, they and the majority of rational thinkers regard this division as mistaken, as indeed it is. The distinction between a constitutive essential attribute and an external inseparable attribute is invalid: it amounts to nothing more than an arbitrary stipulation that distinguishes between things that are alike, as has been explained at length elsewhere.

For this reason, the most accomplished authorities on logic, such as Ibn Sīnā, Abū al-Barakāt, the author of al-Muʿtabar, and others, acknowledge that no consistently applicable distinction can be stated between the two. Ibn Sīnā mentioned three distinctions, while acknowledging that not one of them was