so when they behold the existence pervading created things, this existence becomes manifest to them, and they imagine it to be Allah. They therefore call created things loci of manifestation and disclosure, because they reveal to them what they imagine to be Allah.

Had they instead regarded them as signs that revealed and clarified for them what they indicated in various respects, as well as His knowledge, power, mercy, and wisdom—while knowing that His existence is distinct from theirs—they would have been rightly guided.

What this man says, in agreement with the author of Mishkāt al-anwār—that light causes colours to exist and enables us to perceive them, just as Allah causes existing things to exist and enables us to know them—is incorrect. Colours exist in themselves, whether we perceive them or not, and their existence does not depend on light. Light is a condition for our perception of them, not for their existence.

The relationship between creation and the Creator is not like this. Rather, the Creator brings existing things themselves into being. His relationship to them is not that of a condition to what is conditioned by it, or anything similar implied by this man’s statements in Tahāfut al-tahāfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), and by the statements of others like him among these unionist philosophers and others. They make His relationship to existing things like that of matter to form, form to matter, the universal to the particular, the genus to the species, or the species to the individual, and other such comparisons. These imply that He depends on them and they depend on Him, each standing in relation to the other as a condition to what is conditioned by it—as the author of al-Fusūs and others have explicitly stated.

Rather, He—glory be to Him—is self-sufficient, independent in every respect of everything other than Him, and everything