their position is closer to reason than his claim that He is neither within the world nor outside it. In answering the objection concerning intermingling, they offer arguments which, although false, are closer to reason than his own. For example, they say that He is like sunlight, which is not rendered impure by whatever it touches, or like space and air, which are unaffected by whatever is within them, and other such analogies they draw for Allah. Thus, although in many of their statements they posit a rival, an equal, a likeness, and a namesake for Allah, if their position is not better than his, it is not much worse.

If, however, you mean that reason disproves this position, you have offered no rational proof of its falsity. At most, you have described something from which people instinctively recoil, or something that entails a kind of imperfection. Yet you maintain that reason provides no basis for denying imperfection of Allah, and that you deny it only on the basis of consensus. This argument, then, concerns those who adopt the third alternative.

As for the second alternative—being finite in one direction but not another—I know of no one who holds it. If anyone does hold it, he would be saying that He is above the Throne, extending without limit: finite in the direction of the world, but infinite in the other direction. I have not heard that anyone has said this, and al-Ashʿarī’s account