the Khārijites. Only Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamā‘a—the people of the Sunnah and the community—can do so: they acknowledge the general scope of these verses and their inclusion of everyone who participated in the Pledge of Ridwān. They also accept the authentic hadith transmitted concerning the virtues of the Companions and acknowledge that the Companions were truthful in their transmission. They are therefore able to refute the Khārijites and the Rāfidīs through sound methods free of contradiction.

Likewise, only Ahl al-Sunnah, who affirm Allah’s exaltedness above His creation and His distinctness from it, can refute the advocates of divine indwelling and demonstrate the falsity of their position by means of the truth. Their position directly contradicts that of the advocates of indwelling, and whoever knows that one of two contradictories is established can refute its opposite. By contrast, the position of the negationists entails denying both contradictories, or two propositions equivalent to contradictories. Denying both is more plainly false than affirming the false alternative: clear reason recognizes that denying both is impossible, whereas the falsity of one of them is less evident to reason. Thus, whoever denies both contradictories, or their equivalents, cannot refute someone who affirms one of them. Whatever argument someone who denies both opposing alternatives puts forward, someone who affirms one of them can counter it with a stronger argument of the same kind.

This is why sound minds agree more emphatically in rejecting the position of those who deny both opposing alternatives than in rejecting the position of the advocates of indwelling. For the more the necessarily existent Being is described with attributes of nonexistent and impossible things, the greater the falsity and error, compared with describing Him in terms closer to what exists.

This is further clarified by the fact that negative attributes contain no praise in themselves, nor do they confer