“…the pathways of the heavens, that I may look upon the God of Moses—yet, indeed, I think he is a liar.” (Q 40:37)

As for these people, they imagine that they acknowledge and affirm the Maker; but they do not affirm Him as separate from the universe. Instead, they equate His existence with the existence of the world, or claim that He indwells within it. Their discourse is confused and self-contradictory, for they vacillate between union (ittiḥād) and indwelling (ḥulūl). The root of their error is their refusal to concede that the Creator is distinct from creation. Their hearts seek an existent being, yet they reject the idea that He is separate from the cosmos. Consequently, they search for Him within the world or declare that His very existence is the existence of the world, making Him either the world itself, or a part of it, or one of its qualities—or else they say, “He is the world and yet He is not the world,” thereby combining two opposites.

This, in essence, is the doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī. He identifies God’s existence with that of the universe while asserting that the essence of a thing is other than its existence—much like those who claim that a nonexistent entity is nevertheless “something.” He thus draws an artificial distinction between existence and subsistence, a spurious distinction that renders his position self-contradictory.

Many other people likewise speak of some form of indwelling or union, despite the contradictions in their statements; traces of this can be found in the writings of numerous Sufis.

On this issue people have adopted four positions. The doctrine with which Allah sent His messengers, revealed His scriptures, and which was upheld by the early generations of the ummah and its leading scholars, is to affirm the Creator while declaring that He is distinct from and exalted above the universe.

The Jahmiyyah and those akin to them, however, split into three further views. The first is the view of the pure negators—the majority of Jahmite theologians and dialecticians—who deny