This is the doctrine of the leading Jahmiyyah: they affirm an absolute existent whose existence in concrete reality is impossible. Ibn Sīnā and his followers say that it is absolute existence conditioned on the negation of all affirmative determinations. This is the view that most emphatically renders it nonexistent. Others describe it as absolute, conditioned on the negation of affirmative and negative determinations, or as subject to no condition involving affirmative or negative determinations. Both views are held by groups of heretical Bātiniyyah and those Sufis who agree with them.

It is well known that existence conditioned on the negation of both is impossible. How much more so, then, when it is conditioned on negation? For what is conditioned on nonexistence is more deserving of nonexistence than what is conditioned on neither existence nor nonexistence, and than what is conditioned on the negation of existence and nonexistence together. This is the absolute conditioned on absoluteness.

In their logic, they acknowledge what all rational people agree upon: that the absolute conditioned on absoluteness has no existence in concrete reality. They also establish that the differentiae distinguishing two existents must be positive rather than privative. Yet they distinguish necessary existence from contingent existence only through privative features. And whoever supposes that Ibn Sīnā’s doctrine affirms a particular existence comparable to existence conditioned