that is impossible in a created being and cannot even be conceived in the imagination. They say:

“It is permissible to describe Him with such negations as cannot be conceived or imagined of anyone else.”

If they allow Him to be described by what cannot be conceived of any other existing thing, then let them describe Him with all the other impossibilities concerning existing things. Let them say:

“He is neither eternal nor brought into existence; He neither subsists in Himself nor in another; He is neither prior to another nor coexistent with it,”

and so forth. Let them say:

“This is impossible only in other existing things, not in Him.”

Then they will say:

“He is neither living nor dead, neither knowing nor ignorant, neither capable nor incapable, neither existent nor nonexistent.”

This is the ultimate conclusion of the Qarmatians’ position: affirming both members of a contradictory pair, or denying both.

It is well known that when reason judges decisively that two things cannot coexist or both be absent—whether one involves existence and the other nonexistence, which is contradiction in the specific sense, or both involve existence—we initially learn this from the existing things we observe. Likewise, the attributes that are affirmed, such as life, knowledge, power, speech, and the like, are initially known to us through what we know of the existing things familiar to us.

Then, when the truthful one whose truthfulness is attested tells us about the unseen, which we do not witness, we understand the meaning he intended to convey to us only because what he tells us of the unseen shares a common element with what we know of the observable world—an element involving a degree of correspondence and resemblance. Thus, when he tells us of the water, milk, honey, wine, silk, and gold in Paradise, we cannot understand what he intends to convey unless we know these things in this world and know that they share with what is in Paradise a common element and a correspondence