the reply is:

If by saying, “He became perfect through it,” you mean that another bestowed perfection upon Him, that is false. But if you mean that, were it not for that other, knowledge of it would not have existed, then the answer is: yes. This poses no difficulty, for several reasons.

First, He Himself brought that other into existence. It and everything necessarily accompanying it came into existence through His power and will. Thus, whatever accrued to Him did so through Him alone.

Second, even if that other were assumed to exist through something other than Him, knowing it would be more perfect than not knowing it.

Third, if knowledge of another is conditional upon that other, and would not arise without it, while that other exists in either case—whether He knows it or not—then its existence without the perfection attainable alongside it constitutes deficiency. For deficiency consists in the absence of what can exist, not of what cannot. Knowledge is an attribute of perfection, and knowledge of everything is possible. Its presence is therefore a perfection, and its absence a deficiency.

[Return to Ibn Malkā’s discussion in al-Mu'tabar and Ibn Taymiyyah’s commentary]

Abū al-Barakāt said:

“As for the claim that apprehending other things entails otherness in Him, and that the multiplicity of the objects apprehended entails multiplicity in Him, the precise answer is that this does not produce multiplicity in His essence, but only in His relations and connections. These do not introduce multiplicity into His identity or essence. Nor is the unity entailed for Him by His necessary existence through Himself and His being the First Principle—by which we have known Him, and on the basis of which we have affirmed of Him what we have affirmed and denied of Him