between obedience and disobedience, the righteous and the wicked, the people of Paradise and the people of Hellfire, and between mercy and punishment. Consequently they never praised Him for the justice He carries out or for refraining from wrongdoing, nor for the beneficence and favor He bestows or for withholding torment and vengeance.

The others, imagining they were exalting Him on the basis of the “rational ugliness” they themselves posited—though in truth it has no reality—ended up equating Him with His creatures in what is deemed good or evil and likening Him to His servants in what they are commanded or forbidden to do.

[How those who focus on the divine decree while turning away from the Law contradict the religion of Allah]

[Their clash with the necessities of sense-perception and natural experience]

Whoever looks only at the decree—qadar (divine decree)—magnifies the state of annihilation in tawḥīd al-rubūbiyyah (affirming the oneness of Lordship), and halts at the merely cosmic reality will fail to distinguish between knowledge and ignorance, truth and falsehood, righteousness and wickedness, justice and injustice, obedience and sin, guidance and misguidance, rectitude and deviance, the friends of Allah and His enemies, and the people of Paradise and the people of Hellfire. Such people, while obviously contradicting the Books of Allah, His religion, and His laws, also collide with the certainties of sense-perception and experiential taste, as well as the demands of reason and sound analogy. For each of them must inevitably delight in some things and suffer pain from others; he therefore distinguishes between what is fit to eat and drink and what is unfit, and between the heat that harms him