and of divisibility and composition, other than these two meanings and the like. Muslims agree that these are to be denied of Allah—unless some ignorant, misguided people unknown to me have held it possible for one part of Him to separate from another, as is reported of some unbelievers. There is no way to catalogue everything human beings say. The point is simply that, among the accounts of the doctrines of the various groups within the Muslim community, I have found none attributing this view to any group.

Rather, when the leading proponents of this position—the Jahmiyyah, the philosophers, the Mu‘tazilah, and those attribute-affirmers who follow them—deny these things, they intend the negations associated with their denial of body in general: that no one part of Him can be pointed to independently of another, nor can anything in Him be distinguished from anything else, such that He has no magnitude, boundary, sides, or endpoint. Nor is He a self-subsisting entity that can be pointed to, or one part of which can be pointed to independently of another. Indeed, on closer examination, neither can one part of Him be seen independently of another. This, in their terminology, is the negation of quantity and spatial extent.

Those other than the attribute-affirmers, however, mean that He has no attributes, since the existence of attributes entails corporeality, divisibility, and composition, as their position on this will be explained later. These people deny corporeality and resemblance, yet their opponents among those who deny the attributes and those who affirm them consider them inconsistent in doing so. Likewise, those who deny the attributes affirm an absolute existent abstracted from attributes and magnitudes, yet in this they are inconsistent in the judgment of