habit. Does this habit arise from sound knowledge and a belief corresponding to reality, or from a false imagining? The former supports the argument at issue, while the latter is not conceded. He has offered no evidence for it beyond his assertion that they have never observed a being possessing knowledge, power, and life except as a body, and that they have merely drawn an analogy between the unseen Being possessing knowledge, power, and life and the beings they have observed possessing these qualities. They thus become like someone who has seen only black people and heard only Arabic: whenever he imagines a human being or a language, only a black person or Arabic comes to mind.

It is clear that this is a faulty analogy. Someone who has seen only black people and heard only Arabic thinks first of a black person when imagining someone speaking to him, and thinks first of Arabic when imagining verbal expression, because what he imagines belongs to the same kind as what he has observed. Imagination follows sensory perception: what he imagines is of the same kind as what he has perceived, because he knows that both belong to the same kind.

But the Creator—glorified and exalted is He—is not, in their view or anyone else’s, of the same kind as human beings, such that His relation to the living, knowing, powerful beings they have observed would resemble the relation between people they have not seen and those they have seen. Indeed, most of those who call upon Allah with their hands raised upwards have never entertained the thought that Allah is of the same kind as human beings, sharing their essential nature, so that He would be flesh and blood or anything of that sort. Rather, all of them declare Allah Most High far above such things. Among the general body of those who acknowledge the Maker, no one is known to have professed anything of the sort, apart from what has been reported by the authors