[Ibn Taymiyyah’s Commentary]

I say:

Let the discerning reader consider how these men—who claim such expertise and exactitude that they use them to reject what the messengers brought—speak, at the very pinnacle of their wisdom and philosophy, in terms resembling the speech of madmen. Through misleading and deceptive language, they reject truths known self-evidently and accept falsehoods whose falsity is equally self-evident. He has set out the implications for those who affirm the attributes and those who deny them.

He said:

“Those who deny the attributes must maintain that the attributes reduce to a single essence, so that knowledge, power, and will have one and the same meaning, and that knowledge and the knower, power and the powerful, and will and the one who wills are identical.” He has said that this is difficult.

I say:

Rather, what must be said is that the falsity of this is self-evident. Anyone who identifies knowledge with power and power with will, and identifies will with the one who wills, knowledge with the knower, and power with the powerful, contradicts self-evident knowledge and engages in sophistry greater than that of many sophists. Pursuing this doctrine leads to the possibility that the speaker is speech itself, the moving thing is motion itself, the person praying is prayer itself, and the person fasting is fasting itself, and so forth.

Even if he distinguishes between inseparable attributes and other attributes, there is no real difference; this is merely an arbitrary distinction. He must then hold that the speaking human being is speech itself, the neighing horse is neighing itself, the braying donkey is braying itself, and the body that senses and moves voluntarily is sensation and voluntary motion themselves. He must also hold that