the condition for necessary existence, you will not find this perceptible thing to be necessary, and you will recite His words, Most High:
“I do not love those that set.” [al-An‘ām: 76]
For descent into the realm of contingency is a kind of setting.”
I say: This is the position of the outright eternalists among the philosophers and others, who deny that the world proceeds from an agent or a cause that necessarily entails it. It is the position openly professed by Pharaoh and others.
Upon examination, the position of those ancient philosophers who profess the oneness of existence ultimately amounts to this. Among these are those philosophers who claim true insight, affirmation of divine oneness, and knowledge, such as Ibn ‘Arabī, Ibn Sab‘īn, and others like them. They do not affirm two distinct existents, one of which brought the other into being. Rather, all existence is, in their view, necessary existence.
Then, when they saw that existing things display differences and distinctions, and that among them are things that came into being after its existence, they needed to reconcile existence being numerically one with the distinctions and differences found within it.
Sometimes they say: The entities are fixed in nonexistence, and the existence of the Real has flowed over them. Thus, they combine the claim that the nonexistent is something fixed in nonexistence, independent of Allah Most High—as some Mu‘tazilīs and Shī‘īs have said—with the further claim that its existence is the existence of the Creator, Most High.
No adherent of any religious community has said this, nor even any of the theistic philosophers. This is the true substance of Ibn ‘Arabī’s position.
At other times, they identify the Necessary Existent with absolute existence, on condition of its absoluteness, and identify the entities with contingent beings, as his associate al-Qūnawī maintains.
Ibn Sīnā and his followers say that necessary existence is absolute existence, on condition of its being free of every positive determination. This is even more untenable than the former view, for the absolute, on condition of its absoluteness, has no