Likewise, if you say to them:

“Just as you cannot conceive of anything self-subsistent except as occupying a spatial location and having a direction, so you cannot conceive of anything self-subsistent except as a body,”

they reply:

“We stand by that as well.”

If you then begin arguing with them against corporeality, they have two approaches. The first is to say: “This challenges self-evident truths by means of theoretical reasoning, so we do not accept it,” as explained earlier. The second is to demonstrate the invalidity of the arguments advanced by those who deny corporeality, and have you acknowledge their invalidity.

In numerous passages in your works, you and your predecessors, such as al-Ghazālī and others, expose the flaws in the speculative theologians’ arguments that every body has come into being. You raise objections to those arguments that cannot be refuted, as you did in al-Mabāhith al-Mashriqiyya and al-Matālib al-ʿĀliya—indeed, as did those who came after you, such as al-Āmidī, al-Ārmawī, and others. Elsewhere, you challenge the arguments of those who maintain that a body is composite and that every composite is intrinsically dependent. You also challenge the philosophers’ proofs for the contingency of every composite, as al-Ghazālī did in Tahāfut al-Falāsifa, and as al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, and others did.

This argument—that the Lord’s self-subsistence entails that He can be pointed to and that He is above the world—was a rational argument that could not be rebutted. Since it was among the arguments the Karrāmiyya used in their debate with Abū Ishāq al-Isfarāyīnī, Abū Ishāq and others sought refuge in denying that the Lord is self-subsistent in the intelligible sense,