As for the contradiction in pure reason: whenever someone affirms one thing yet denies another on the grounds that it would entail corporeality, his opponent can always level the very same charge against what he himself has affirmed. Such is the customary back-and-forth among the various sects.

When the Muʿtazilah said to the attribute-affirmers from among the Ashʿarīs and others: “If you claim that Allah possesses life, knowledge, power, and speech, these notions are intelligible only as accidents, and an accident can subsist only in a body,” the attribute-affirmers replied: “You and we are agreed that Allah is living, knowing, and powerful, yet we can conceive of a living, knowing, powerful being only as a body. If it is admissible to affirm a living, knowing, powerful being that is not a body, then it is likewise admissible to affirm life and power that subsist in Him without being accidents, while He Himself is not a body.”

In like manner, a group of the Bāṭinīs and the philosophers said to the Muʿtazilah: “When you say that Allah is living, knowing, and powerful, we can conceive of no bearer of these names except a body.” The Muʿtazilah responded: “Yet you maintain that Allah exists and is self-subsistent, and such an existent, self-subsistent entity is intelligible only as a body. If it is permissible to affirm an existent, self-subsistent being that is not a body, it is equally permissible to affirm that He is living, knowing, and powerful without Him being a body.”

In the same way, the Muʿtazilite-inclined Ashʿarīs who deny the textual (khabarī) attributes—such as the author of al-Irshād and his followers—said to their own Imams, like Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī and Abū ʿAbd Allāh