and al-Shahrastānī, al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, and others like them who agree with the logicians, concur with the logicians in their claim that the attributes of substances and bodies divide into essential and accidental attributes; that accidental attributes divide into those necessary to the quiddity and those contingent upon it; and that contingent attributes divide into inseparable and separable ones. Yet this account is erroneous, for attributes in fact divide only into those necessary to the quiddity and those contingent upon it.

As for dividing necessary attributes into essential and accidental ones, and affirming two things within these individual entities—one being the essence, and the other this observable existent—this is a false assertion, as has been explained at length elsewhere.

Then, in maintaining that substances and bodies are alike, they claim that all the attributes by which bodies differ are merely contingent upon them and capable of disappearing. None is necessary to their real nature, nor is any required or entailed by their essence. Glory be to Allah! Where, then, is that necessary connection which you exaggerated to the point of making a thing’s real nature a composite of its essential attributes, and saying that its essence entails its necessary concomitants and the necessary concomitants of those concomitants?

Here, however, they say that these individual entities have no self-subsisting real nature except what they all share, and that none has a necessary concomitant peculiar to it, nor any necessary concomitant by which it differs