negation is utterly unsound and contradictory. They inevitably contradict themselves, either in their doctrine itself or in their argument for it. Their accounts of their opponents’ views contain distortions, reckless assertions, and unwarranted vilification, as becomes clear to anyone who examines them. One example is their denunciation of those who affirm the attributes: “You affirm a plurality of beginningless entities.” Yet “beginningless” is an ambiguous expression through which they lead some people to imagine that their opponents affirm a plurality of deities—especially since most of their leading authorities, such as al-Jubbā’ī and those before him, maintain that the Lord’s most distinctive attribute is beginninglessness, and that sharing this attribute entails likeness. Thus, they argue, if an attribute shared the beginninglessness of the One possessing it, it would be His equal.

Yet this is utterly unsound, for the Lord has many distinctive characteristics that cannot be ascribed to anyone else: He is the Lord of all worlds, knows all things, has power over all things, and is the Ever-Living, the All-Sustaining, who subsists in Himself, is beginningless and necessarily existent, and sustains everything besides Himself. These and similar distinctive characteristics are shared with Him by neither an attribute nor anything else.

The reply is that the beginninglessness peculiar to Him is the beginninglessness of One who subsists in Himself. Likewise, His necessary existence is the necessary existence of One who subsists in Himself, and the same applies to similar characteristics.

As for the attributes that subsist only in Him, even if they are said to be beginningless or necessarily existent, there is no doubt that they do not subsist in themselves; rather, they subsist only in the One possessing them. The reality is that what is beginningless and necessarily existent in itself is the essence that necessarily entails the attributes of perfection. An essence stripped of these attributes, or attributes detached from that essence, has no existence, let alone being necessarily existent in itself or beginningless. Thus their assertion, despite its unsoundness,