separation and distinction in spatial location and direction. The evidence for this is that it is not customary to say that color is apart from taste and separate from it, even though one is unlike the other. Thus, difference understood as the absence of likeness entails separation.

The thirty-fourth point: It may be said that two things differing in reality are two things that are not alike. Likeness is therefore the opposite of difference, and difference the opposite of likeness. The absence of likeness must necessarily entail real, positive attributes by which the two differ; otherwise, sheer nonexistence cannot distinguish one from the other. Thus, separateness, in the sense of difference in reality, requires positive characteristics by which one differs from the other in a way that rules out their being alike.

If this is what is meant by separation, it cannot be known until one knows that the two things are not alike. That, in turn, is possible only after knowing positive characteristics that rule out their being alike, just as one knows taste, color, and smell and thus knows that they are not alike.

Yet one knows that the Creator is separate from creation, distinct from it, and apart from it before knowing that Allah has no likeness and that His reality differs from the reality of the world, just as one may