corporeal. They cannot cite any sound distinction, and whatever they say may be turned back against them by the one who affirms the attributes; thus the line they draw between what they dub “anthropomorphism” and what they do not utterly collapses. One is therefore compelled either to affirm everything or to deny everything.

Yet wholesale denial is impossible, for it is self-evident that all that exists falls into two categories: (1) a Necessary, Eternal, Self-Subsisting, Independent Creator, and (2) a contingent, originated, governed, needy creation. There is no way to regard all existence as one Necessary Being, as the monists assert, nor to make it wholly created, dependent, and originated without a creator, as is reported of some who claimed that the entire universe came into being without a cause. The falsity of both notions is among the clearest axiomatic truths. For this reason the monists are internally inconsistent and cannot live by their own thesis, while the idea that the whole of existence arose without an originator is not actually espoused by any sect; it is raised only hypothetically, like many sophistic assertions, in order to show its impossibility and absurdity.

It is now evident that the statements of those who deny the divine attributes resemble the atheist position that abolishes the Maker altogether. The second doctrine—positing a “pure existence” stripped of both negation and affirmation—is one of the two views held by the Qarmatian Bāṭiniyyah, while the first is that of the branch closest to them: the deniers of positive attributes who describe Him only through negations.