Moreover, if the Necessary Being were distinguished only by a privative attribute while every contingent being were distinguished by a positive one, every contingent being would, in that case, be more perfect than He. In the same way, a sheer negation that contains no positive content is not an attribute of perfection; it becomes one only when the negation implies an affirmative reality, as in His words: “Neither drowsiness nor sleep overtakes Him” (Q 2:255).
Accordingly, the Muʿtazilites—together with those later scholars who sided with them, such as Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī in one of his two positions, and others—when they claim that necessary existence is an attribute of the divine reality, and when those who occasionally follow them distinguish between a thing’s existence and its concrete reality, as Abū al-Ḥasan ibn al-Zāghūnī does in certain passages, their view, though not without error, is still preferable to that of these philosophers.
As for the objection the philosophers raise—namely, that necessary existence can never be an effect—we answer: Do you mean that the Necessary Existent in Himself can neither be produced nor be the effect of an efficient cause? Or do you mean that existence cannot be an attribute of an already-existing quiddity and therefore cannot be caused by a receptive (as opposed to an efficient) cause? Or do you intend something else entirely?
If you mean the first, we agree; yet our assertion that necessary existence is an attribute of the necessary quiddity in no way implies that it is produced by an efficient cause. If, however, you contend that existence is not an attribute at all, this is inadmissible, for existence is indeed the attribute of the Necessary Being just as existence is the attribute of every existent. The One who is necessary in Himself is the entity described by necessity; necessity itself is not that very entity. Likewise, the One who exists in Himself is the Necessary Existent; His mere existence is not, in and of itself, the Necessary Being. This is the answer.