objectionable, by common agreement. For man’s being in the image of Allah—understood as His attribute, His conceptual image, or His spiritual image—involves a kind of resemblance, just as accepting the hadith as it has come down involves a kind of resemblance. The most that can be said is that the resemblance is greater in the latter case. Nevertheless, some form of likeness is necessarily implied on either interpretation, while the likeness ruled out by revelation, consensus, and sound rational proofs is absent on either interpretation.

If the disputant claims that this involves a kind of corporealism entailing composition, it has already been explained that what they call composition necessarily follows from affirming the attributes—indeed, even from affirming existence itself. Rather, it is inseparable from existence as such. This has already been explained, and we have shown that all the purported rational proofs precluding it are unsound and self-contradictory. Their unsoundness is evident; their self-contradiction consists in the fact that what the claimant maintains commits him to affirming the counterpart of what he denies. He thus combines denial with affirmation of the very same thing or its counterpart.

The seventh argument: It may be said: If man is created in the conceptual image of Allah Most High, then either this entails that