Only the deniers of Allah’s attributes among the Jahmiyyah and Bātiniyyah dispute this. They do not call Him by any of the Most Beautiful Names by which He named Himself and by which His messengers named Him. They do not even say that He is a thing or that He exists, because, they claim, this would entail likening Him to other things and existent beings.

[An objection raised by the atheists]

The atheistic philosophers raise a well-known objection to the assertion: “He must be either living or dead, knowing or ignorant, capable or incapable, possessed of hearing and sight or blind and deaf.” They argue that each pair exhibits the opposition of privation and possession, not that of negation and affirmation.

The difference between the two is that the former involves the absence of a quality from something naturally capable of possessing it—as when life, hearing, sight, and knowledge are absent from an animal, which is capable of possessing them. When they are absent from it, it must therefore be dead, blind, deaf, and ignorant. An inanimate thing, however, cannot possess these qualities, so it is described as neither living nor dead, neither knowing nor ignorant, neither hearing and seeing nor blind and deaf.

[Responses to this objection from several angles]

I say: We have discussed this objection at length, even though al-Āmidī and others like him were unable to resolve it and indeed acknowledged its force. We have explained the answer to it in several ways.

First

That which cannot possess attributes of perfection is more deficient than that which can possess them; and a living being that is ignorant, blind, and deaf, by virtue of its capacity for knowledge