that they exist only in constant conjunction with, and inseparable from, concrete particulars, as the followers of Aristotle maintain.

The partisans of “unity of being” (wahdat al-wujūd)—when some of them, such as Ibn Sabʿīn, al-Qūnawī, and their peers, declared that what truly exists is the absolute existence—went on, al-Qūnawī among them, to claim that this “absolute without condition” has real existence outside the mind. This, too, is untenable, for an unconditioned absolute existent would necessarily embrace both categories, the necessary and the contingent; the contingent would thus be included within the very designation “Necessary Existent.”

They draw a distinction between the two only because they suppose that the existence of the contingent is something added to its essence—an assumption that is false—and that the Necessary is set apart solely by negative restrictions. Yet negations, on their own principles, cannot differentiate; two existents can be distinguished only by positive, existential properties. Moreover, for those who hold that the absolute exists in external reality, that absolute would be a mere component of each particular, so the Lord of all worlds would become a part of every created thing.

Indeed, nothing universal or absolute is found in the external realm except in a determinate, individuated form; what is universal in the intellect exists in actuality only as something specific and particular. Consequently, those who assert that the Necessary Existent is either sheerly absolute or qualified only by negations—whether Ibn Sīnā, the proponents of wahdat al-wujūd, or others—are, in fact, affirming no true essence for Him at all.