Objection: You may argue, “The impossibility of negating both contradictories applies only to something that is capable of receiving either one of them. These two qualities stand in the relation of privation and possession, not pure affirmation and negation; for we do not describe a wall as blind or sighted, alive or dead, since it is incapable of either.”

Reply (first point): We answer, first, that this reasoning cannot be applied to existence and non-existence, for these two are opposites of affirmation and negation, as all rational people agree. Consequently, the removal of one necessarily entails the presence of the other.

As for what you mentioned concerning life and death, knowledge and ignorance, that is nothing more than a verbal convention coined by the Peripatetic philosophers, and terminological conventions are no proof against rational realities. Allah the Exalted says, “Those whom they invoke apart from Allah create nothing, while they themselves are created; they are dead, not living, and they do not perceive when they will be resurrected” (16:20–21). Thus He called