And it is not fitting for the Most Merciful to take a son. (92) There is no one in the heavens and the earth but will come to the Most Merciful as a servant. (93) He has certainly counted them and numbered them precisely. (94) And each of them will come to Him on the Day of Resurrection alone. (95)” [Maryam: 88–95]

Nevertheless, these people are closer to affirmation and knowledge than those who affirm a distinctness that cannot be conceived in any way—the distinctness posited by those who say that He is neither within the world nor outside it. This is unlike any known kind of distinctness, the least of which is the distinctness in reality of an accident from a body or from another accident. That would entail that one inheres in the other, or that both inhere in a single substrate. Since these negators have not affirmed for Him any conceivable, known distinctness between two existing things, it follows that, by the implications of their position, He is nonexistent. The early generations of this community and its leading scholars agreed that this is the reality of the position of those Jahmiyyah who say that He is not above the Throne: they have made Him out to be nonexistent and described Him with the attribute of what does not exist.

This is demonstrated by the fact that this al-Rāzī regarded His distinctness from His creation as being of the same kind as His distinctness from spatial location, which need not exist, as explained earlier. It is thus clear that they have affirmed His distinctness from the world as being of the same kind as the distinctness of something existent from something nonexistent, or of something nonexistent from something else nonexistent. Yet the world undoubtedly exists; they have therefore placed Him on the same footing as what does not exist. This is the reality of their position, even though they may not realize it, for such is the condition of those who go astray.