Egyptians, whom Muslims call heretics because their deviation concerning Allah’s names and signs is far greater than that of the Jews and Christians.

As for the heretics among the Sufis—such as Ibn ‘Arabī al-Kā’ī, his associate al-Sadr al-Qūnawī, Ibn Sab‘īn, Ibn al-Fārid, and others like them—they may say: “He is absolute existence.” This is what al-Qūnawī said, identifying Him with existence considered simply as existence, without regard to whether it is necessary or contingent, one or many. This is the meaning of the position held by Ibn Sab‘īn and others like him who advocate encompassment.

It is well known that the unconditioned absolute—for example, “human being” taken without any qualification—applies to this human being and that human being, and to what is mental and what exists externally. Thus, unconditioned absolute existence applies to the necessary and the contingent, the one and the many, and the mental and the external. Such absolute existence, then, undoubtedly does not exist as an absolute in external reality.

Someone who says that the natural universal exists in external reality may mean something true or something false. If he means that what is universal in the mind exists externally as a particular—that is, that the mental representation corresponds to individual entities existing externally, just as a name corresponds to what it names, and a mental meaning to an externally existing thing—then this is correct.

But if he means by this that the existent thing itself