Allah is the locus of those numerous, infinite forms.”

He said:

“The substance of his reply is that he accepted this consequence and explained that it entails nothing objectionable, for the proof establishes only that Allah’s essence is free of multiplicity. As for the claim that there can be no multiplicity among His concomitants, no proof has established this at all.

We have shown that His knowledge of things is among the concomitants of His knowledge of Himself. Thus, the multiplicity arising from His knowledge of things is a multiplicity among the concomitants of His essence. A multiplicity of concomitants does not entail multiplicity in that to which they necessarily belong. For unity, which is furthest of all things from the nature of multiplicity, has infinitely many concomitants: being half of two, a third of three, a quarter of four, and so on without end.

He then went on to say:

‘A multiplicity of relational and non-relational concomitants accrues to the First, as does a multiplicity of negations, and consequently a multiplicity of names. Yet this has no effect on the oneness of His essence.’”

Al-Rāzī said:

“I say: These words indicate that the Shaykh has departed from the philosophers’ position on two fundamental questions. The first is their well-known assertion that a simple entity cannot be both a recipient and an agent. Here, however, he acknowledged