Thus, when Ahl al-Sunnah say that the Creator’s existence is identical with His reality, they intend to refute the position of Abū Hāshim and those Mu'tazilites who agree with him. They do not mean what Ibn Sīnā and his fellow philosophers maintain: that the Necessary Existent is absolute existence conditioned by absoluteness, or absolute existence without any condition. This position is far more unsound than that of Abū Hāshim.

Indeed, anyone who understands this position can recognize by plain reason that what they describe exists in minds, not in external reality. In their logic, they themselves concede that what is absolute on condition of absoluteness exists only in minds. They also concede that what is absolute without any condition does not exist externally apart from concrete entities.

We have already discussed his claim that he had shown the Ash'arīs to be committed to corporealism. The Hanbalīs, like the other groups, include those who follow the approach of Imam Ahmad and other such imams: they neither affirm nor negate this term with reference to Allah. Rather, they say that affirming it is an innovation, just as denying it is an innovation.

Among the things Ahmad and others condemned in the Jahmiyyah was their denial of this term. He refused to assent to its denial, just as he refused to affirm it. This was also his approach in his debate with Abū 'Īsā Barghūth and other deniers of the divine attributes concerning the Quran, during his well-known ordeal, when the latter pressed him with the argument that the assertion that