Their teaching on the divine attributes is precisely Jahm’s teaching—indeed, it is worse. They went beyond him in denying the truth, the resurrection, and the revealed laws, inheriting from their predecessors among the eternalists denials that Jahm himself had never voiced. They took what the Messenger proclaimed concerning belief in Allah, the Last Day, and the revealed laws, and assigned it esoteric meanings that Muslim scholars necessarily know to be contrary to the religion of the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.

The adherents of al-Ishārāt (Pointers) belong to this same category, though they differ in the extent of their denial and heresy.

As for his statement:

“For you intellectually apprehend your own essence, yet you are not a substrate for it.”

The response is:

For an existent to be known, it need not itself inhere in the knower; rather, knowledge of it must inhere in the knower. Anyone who knows himself must have knowledge of himself subsisting within him. Thus, his knowledge of himself inheres in him; it is not that his self inheres in itself. But he seeks to equate knowledge with the thing known, making whatever is not required of the thing known likewise unnecessary for knowledge, and making knowledge identical with the thing known. This is false, as explained earlier.

[The Seventh Argument]

His statement:

“Rather, your being a substrate for that form was only a condition for that form’s being present to you, which is a condition for your intellectual apprehension of it. If that form were present to you in some way other than by inhering in you, intellectual apprehension would occur without its inhering in you.”

This is self-contradictory. For if one’s being a substrate for that form is