that differ, and two different accidents inhering in two distinct substrates. The least degree of separateness consists in a difference in reality and attributes without a difference in spatial location, as with two different accidents inhering in a single substrate. If the Creator’s separateness from His creation consisted merely in a difference in reality and attributes, without any distinction in direction, spatial location, or magnitude, then His separateness from His creation would be of the same kind as one accident’s separateness from another accident inhering in the same substrate, or a body’s separateness from an accident inhering in its substrate.

This would mean that His separateness from the world is of the same kind as the separateness of two things occupying a single spatial location and inhering in a single substrate. Such separateness would therefore not rule out His being in the same substrate as the world. Indeed, if the world subsists in itself and His separateness from it were of this kind, then His separateness from the world would be that of an accident from the body in which it subsists. The world would be like the body, and He, in relation to it, would be like the accident. This would entail that His separateness from the world is that of something dependent upon the world and upon a substrate in which to inhere—especially since that which subsists in itself has no need of what inheres in it.

This is utterly false and among the gravest forms of disbelief, for Allah has no need of the worlds, as explained previously. On this basis, many of the Jahmiyyah have held that He inheres in every place. At times, they have identified Him with the very existence subsisting in individual entities, with absolute existence, or with existing things themselves. All of this, besides being utterly false, amounts to denying the Maker, for it attributes to Him such poverty and dependence upon