and sitting, going and coming. They do not call these attributes, even though they subsist in a subject.

Likewise, they may not call knowledge that arises in a knowledgeable person and then passes away, or a will that arises in him and then passes away, an attribute of his. Rather, they describe him by what remains firmly established in him, such as an enduring character trait.

In short, these are questions of terminology to be settled by transmitted evidence, not by reason, and this is not the place to discuss them.

As for successive spatial states subsisting in Him, and the subsistence in Him of what they deem impossible, they distinguish between what they allow and what they exclude by the same distinctions that those who affirm the attributes draw between what they attribute to Him and what they exclude. Just as affirming attributes of perfection does not require them to attribute anything else to Him, so these people make the same argument. If the distinction is valid, well and good; otherwise, they are inconsistent.

It is well known that when Allah Most High was described as possessing hearing and sight—as indicated by the revealed texts—those who deny the attributes argued that those who affirm them must also affirm perception through smell, taste, and touch. Some applied the analogy consistently; others distinguished between these three and the other two; still others distinguished perception through touch from perception through smell and taste, because the revealed texts affirm the three but not the two.

Thus, if the Basran Muʿtazila, al-Qādī Abū Bakr, Abū al-Maʿālī, and others who attribute all five forms of perception to Him say to those who attribute only two or three to Him:

“You must