separate from it nor in contact with it—as some Kullābīs and Ashʿarīs maintain, along with their followers among scholars of jurisprudence and hadith, Sufis, Hanbalīs, and others. If their position is true, there is nothing to dispute. If it is false, then the obviousness of its falsity is not […] a self-subsisting being alongside another self-subsisting being: that it is within it, neither in contact with it nor separate from it, and that it is neither within it nor outside it.

Ahmad then presented the second argument, saying: “We said to them: ‘On the Day of Resurrection, will there not be only Paradise or Hell, the Throne, and the air?’”—and so on. He explained that their position necessarily entails that part of Him would be upon the Throne, part in Paradise, part in Hell, and part in the air, since these are the places in which they claimed Allah is present. He would thus be divided into parts as those places are divided into parts. He stated that, at that point, their lies about Allah would become apparent to people, because