So how can it be said that He knows only universals, while it is also claimed that He knows what proceeds from Him?

For this reason, Muslims who affirm the divine attributes cited the point against him, and even some of his own disciples—such as al-Ṭūsī—took him to task. The Muslims maintained that his very words openly entail a plurality in what is known, whereas he is forever fleeing from plurality. As for al-Ṭūsī, when he saw that this implication was inescapable, he repudiated it in Ibn Sīnā’s doctrine and claimed that His knowledge of things is identical with the things themselves, insisting that he had proven it. Yet this is among the most corrupt notions ever uttered and the furthest from sound reason.

People had long marveled at—and mocked—the philosophers for saying that knowledge is the knower and that knowledge is power, thereby collapsing one attribute into another and making the attribute identical with the One described by it. The falsity of this is self-evident to the intellect; awareness of its invalidity is instinctive. Then this later figure went on to something even worse, declaring instead that knowledge is the very objects known. I have never found anyone in the world who preceded him in such a claim. And these men profess to possess the rational sciences! This is their discourse about the Lord of the Worlds—speech that only the most misguided of people could utter.

They advanced such statements merely to avoid affirming a multiplicity of attributes and to escape the admission that temporal events occur with Him. For that reason, many of their own leading authorities—indeed most of them—and a host of their later adherents, such as Abū al-Barakāt, dissented from them on these two points, affirming the attributes and asserting that events arise with Him, as I have already related their opinions. In fact, the majority of the philosophers before Aristotle held that the celestial spheres are originated; yet