“Nothing endowed with knowledge, power, hearing, sight, speech, and will is conceivable except a body. Thus, if you attribute these qualities to Him, you must admit that He is a body.”

If these people say to the Mu'tazilah:

“We and you agree that He is living, knowing, and powerful, yet neither spatially located nor a body. If we can conceive of a living, knowing, and powerful being who is not a body, we can conceive of life, knowledge, and power that do not subsist in a body,”

they reply:

“You, too, have agreed with us that He is living, knowing, and powerful. To affirm one who is living, knowing, and powerful without life, knowledge, or power flies in the face of reason, language, and revelation.”

The Karrāmiyyah say to these people:

“We and you agree that He possesses life, knowledge, power, and similar attributes, while also agreeing that He is not characterized by spatial states. Likewise, if we allow that He hears His servants’ voices when they call upon Him, sees them after He creates them, becomes angry with them when they disobey Him, loves the servant when he draws near to Him through voluntary acts of worship, speaks to Moses when he comes to the valley, and calls His creation to account on the Day of Resurrection—and other such things indicated by the revealed texts—we are not thereby obliged to allow that spatial states can arise in Him.”

Anyone who reflects on the exchanges between these groups will see that, in their departures from the Book and the Sunnah, they rely only on dialectical arguments that they concede to one another.

Their ultimate recourse is an argument by which they seek to establish that the world came into being because spatial states or accidents subsist in it, and similar arguments, which are