darkness. They said that the two had always been separate, then mingled, and that the world arose from their mingling. Thus, every good thing in the world comes from light, and every evil thing in it comes from darkness. No one has affirmed two eternal beings that are alike and wise; nevertheless, we refute this view even though no one holds it. Some Magians hold that Satan came into existence and that Allah, exalted is He, is eternal. As for the Christians, they say that God is one substance in three hypostases, thereby adopting a position close to that of the Kullābīs. The text of their creed—meaning the Christians’ creed—shows that they affirmed entities that act.”

He said: “We refute all these doctrines in order to establish the correctness of our teachers’ position that none is eternal except Allah.”

[Ibn Taymiyyah’s commentary]

The response is that this statement implies that there is no substantive disagreement between him and the leading Kullābīs, Ash'arīs, and all the others who affirm the divine attributes. As for his claim that they affirmed more than one eternal being and an eternal entity subsisting in the essence of Allah, exalted is He, he should be told: The Kullābīs and those scholars of hadith and jurisprudence who followed their path—such as Abū al-Hasan al-Tamīmī, Abū Sulaymān al-Khattābī, and other followers of the four imams and others—do not describe the attributes alone as eternal. They do not say, ‘Knowledge is eternal,’ but rather, ‘The Lord, with His knowledge, is eternal.’ Whoever among them does describe the attributes as eternal does not say that the essence