Creatures have fashioned diverse creeds about the Divine,
and I have embraced every creed they have devised.

As for the fourth position, it is the farthest limit reached by the leading Jahmites: bewilderment and doubt—either because, in their view, the proofs are perfectly balanced, or because no guiding proof is available at all. For the proponents of existential unity, this very bewilderment is deemed the highest form of knowledge of God. A detailed treatment of these questions lies outside the scope of the present discussion.

Our purpose here is simply to highlight the main clusters of these opinions and to expose the root of the error. They seized upon the word “likening” (tashbīh) as an ambiguous, shared term and endeavored to negate it in every conceivable sense. Yet it is self-evident that no two existing things lack some aspect in which they agree. Although the universal concept they share resides only in the mind and not in external reality, there must nonetheless be a certain similarity among the individual instances gathered under a single universal name, by virtue of their agreement in that general meaning.

Many people have stumbled at this point when judging universal matters whose particulars resemble one another. Some assert that the universal subsists externally as a universal; others claim that its instances share nothing but the mere word. This is the debated issue of “states” (aḥwāl), over which many have faltered; the correct conclusion is—