himself: “If you say, ‘He is neither existent nor living nor dead,’ this too likens Him to the nonexistent.” He replied: “I say neither this nor that.”

He then raised another objection against himself: “You have established in logic that when two propositions differ in affirmation and negation, the truth of either entails the falsity of the other. If it is true that He exists, it is false that He does not exist; and if it is true that He does not exist, it is false that He exists. You must therefore accept one of the two.” He answered: “I say neither this nor that. I do not say ‘existent’ or ‘not existent,’ nor ‘nonexistent’ or ‘not nonexistent.’”

This is the ultimate conclusion of the heretics’ discourse. Similar statements have been reported from al-Hallāj and others like him among the adherents of divine indwelling and union: they neither affirm Him nor deny Him, neither love Him nor hate Him.

This misguided man should be told: “Just as affirming two contradictories together is impossible, so too is denying both. If it is impossible for Him to be existent and not existent, it is likewise impossible for Him to be neither existent nor nonexistent. You have thus fallen into something worse than what you sought to escape.

“As for likeness, you sought to escape likening Him to something existent or nonexistent, only to liken Him to the impossible, which has no reality. For that which is neither existent nor nonexistent has no reality whatsoever. This is worse than something of which it can be said that it is existent or nonexistent.”

A number of later scholars, such as al-Shahrastānī, al-Āmidī, al-Rāzī—in some of his statements—and others, sought to answer these people on this point by saying that the terms “the Existent,” “the Living,” “the All-Knowing,” “the All-Powerful,” and similar names are applied to the Necessary and the contingent as homonyms, just as the word