the world as Allah must be declared free of. These people claimed that they had declared Him free of spatial location and direction so that He would not depend upon anything else. Yet through this supposed declaration of His transcendence, they made Him dependent upon everything, and explicitly affirmed this dependence, as we have mentioned elsewhere. Glory be to Him! Exalted is He far above what the wrongdoers say.

“They say, ‘The Most Merciful has taken a son.’ {88} You have certainly made a monstrous claim. {89} The heavens almost rupture at it, the earth splits apart, and the mountains collapse in devastation, {90} because they attribute a son to the Most Merciful. {91} It is not fitting for the Most Merciful to take a son. {92} Everyone in the heavens and the earth will come to the Most Merciful only as a servant. {93} He has certainly enumerated them and counted them precisely. {94} And each of them will come to Him on the Day of Resurrection alone.” {95}

[Maryam 88-95]

Nevertheless, these people are closer to affirmation and knowledge than those who affirm a separateness that cannot be conceived in any way—the separateness asserted by those who say that He is neither inside the world nor outside it. Such separateness is unlike any known kind of separateness, the least of which is an accident’s separateness in its reality from a body or another accident. That entails either that one is in the other or that both are in a single substrate.

Since these negators have not affirmed for Him any intelligible, recognizable separateness of the kind found between two existing things, it follows that, according to the implications of their position, He is nonexistent. The early generations of the Muslim community and its imams agreed that this is the true import of the position of these Jahmiyyah who say that He is not above the Throne: they have made Him nonexistent and described Him with the attributes of what is nonexistent.