a body, since a body is composite. Thus no attribute can subsist in Him, because an attribute can subsist only in a body; nor can He be above the world, because only a body can be above the world.

Nor can He be seen in the Hereafter, because only a body, or an accident inhering in a body, can be seen. His speech is created, because if speech subsisted in Him, He would be a body.

Ibn Sīnā and others like him adopted these principles and pressed their implications further against the Mu‘tazilites. They went beyond them in denying the attributes, until Ibn Sīnā’s denial became more overt than theirs—indeed, more extreme than that of Jahm, the chief of those who denied the attributes.

Ibn Sīnā and others like him differed with the Mu‘tazilites on various matters. On some they were right to oppose them, and on others they were wrong. Yet some of the points on which they were right came to be used by them to support their own falsehood, owing to the weakness of the method by which the Mu‘tazilites sought to refute that falsehood.

Anyone who examines what I have mentioned will find it in Ibn Sīnā’s works, such as al-Ishārāt and others. It will become clear to the discerning scholar that he based his heretical belief in the eternity of the world solely on the denial of the attributes. For when the Mu‘tazilites denied the attributes and actions subsisting in His essence and called this monotheism, and Ibn Sīnā agreed with them in upholding this negation that they called monotheism, he demonstrated that affirming the world’s coming into existence was incompatible with this principle, thereby exposing their inconsistency.