and openly defy the laws of Islam. In denying the attributes, he is worse than the Mu'tazilah and others like them, much like his fellow esotericist philosophers. He even identifies knowledge with the knower, and knowledge with power. Although he agrees with Ibn Sīnā in denying the attributes, he exposes the unsoundness of the argument Ibn Sīnā advanced in departing from the ancient philosophers: that the Necessary Existent, to which existence bears witness, cannot possess attributes, because this would entail composition. Despite his attacks on Abū Hāmid, he agrees with him that Ibn Sīnā’s argument for denying the attributes—that necessary existence entails the absence of composition, which in turn entails the absence of attributes—is unsound. Instead, he adopts the Mu'tazilah’s argument: that this entails composition, and anything composite requires someone to compose it. This argument, too, is of the same unsound kind.

He likewise rejects as unsound their arguments for denying corporeality. At length, he criticizes Ibn Sīnā’s argument and those of the Mu'tazilah and the Ash'arīs. His own denial of corporeality rests on establishing the existence of the rational soul and that it is not a body, from which he concludes that Allah must not be a body.

There is no doubt that this argument is even less sound than the others. The argument for denying that the soul is a body is far weaker than the corresponding argument concerning the Necessary Existent. Moreover, those who dispute his position concerning the soul are more numerous than those who dispute his position on that matter. Yet what emboldens him and others like him is the weakness of Abū Hāmid’s disputation with them concerning the soul. Abū Hāmid exposed the unsoundness of the arguments they used to deny that the Necessary Existent is not a body, and showed that they had no proof of this; rather, the proof of it lies only in the method of