the statement, “He derives His perfection from something other than Himself.” If that “other” is understood to mean His inseparable attributes, this entails no difficulty; rather, it is necessary. For perfection does not consist in positive realities, nor does it consist in privations. He, glorified is He, is perfect through those positive realities that characterize His reality and essence.

The eighteenth point: Is that other, through which you claim He derives His perfection, not independent of Allah, or not dependent upon Allah? If you say that it is independent of Allah, nothing in existence is independent of Allah; rather, all created things depend upon Him. If, instead, you say that it depends upon Allah, your statement means that He derives His perfection from something that depends upon Him. Whatever depends upon Him must either be inseparable from His essence or come into existence through His will and choice. Thus, the matter comes back to His deriving His perfection from His own essence and His will, which is inseparable from His essence. That perfection would therefore derive from His own essence, as explained above. Consequently, your statement that He is deficient in Himself and derives His perfection from something other than Himself is invalid, for His essence necessarily entails that perfection, and its deficiency is therefore inconceivable.

The nineteenth point: In your Nihāya, you claimed that the impossibility of deficiency in Allah is not known through reason, but is established only if you establish it through consensus. Some of his wording on this matter has already been quoted. In his discussion of hearing and sight, he said, when his fellow theologians argued that the opposite of these