inanimate matter “dead,” and this usage is well known in Arabic and in other languages.

Second point: We further say to you that whatever is incapable of being described by life and death, blindness and sight, and the other pairs of opposites, is more deficient than something that can receive such descriptions. A blind person, who is in principle capable of sight, is more perfect than an inanimate object that can possess neither. You have therefore fled from likening Him to living beings that are receptive to attributes of perfection, only to characterize Him with the attributes of lifeless objects that admit of none of them.

Moreover, that which cannot accept either existence or non-existence is more impossible than what can accept them, and even more impossible than the conjunction of existence and non-existence or their joint negation. Hence, when you denied of a thing even the capacity for either existence or non-existence, you conceived something still more impossible than denying both existence and non-existence of it outright. If the latter is impossible to sound intellects, the former is even more so; thus you have made the Necessary Existent, which by definition does not admit non-existence, the greatest of all impossibilities. This is the height of contradiction and corruption.

Among these Bāṭinis—that esoteric faction—some explicitly declare the removal of both contradictories, existence and non-existence; but removing them is the same as combining them. Others say, “I do not affirm either one…"