and blood. If you say, “He can know without being flesh or blood,” you are told, “Likewise, He can be light without being a body or a shining radiance—not in the manner you conceive of things upon which attributes, increase, and decrease leave their mark. Your position amounts to nothing but stripping Allah, glorified be He, of His attributes and negating Him.”

Abū Bakr ibn Fūrak said: “I have reproduced this passage from his book—may Allah Most High have mercy on him—in full and in his own words, because it establishes this description of Allah Most High through adherence to the clear, decisive text of the Book, and because he does not consider it right to depart from the Book, so long as adherence to it is possible, in favor of opinion and personal inclination unsupported by any sound principle. He has explained this with the utmost clarity and removed all ambiguity, showing that revelation is the authoritative basis for naming Allah, Mighty and Majestic. Nor need this name be interpreted figuratively on the grounds that it would entail His possessing all the characteristics of something created. For that would require interpreting figuratively all His other names conveyed by revelation, glorified and exalted be He, since the full range of characteristics found in created beings cannot rightly be ascribed to Him, Most High.”

I say: This statement which he relates from Ibn Kullāb entails rejecting the interpretation of ‘light’ as ‘guide’ and the like, and indicates that this is the interpretation adopted by those Mu'tazilites who interpreted it in that way. It also entails that the objectionable consequence of the interpretation he adopts is of the same kind as