It may then be said:

Grant that this is their position. Are these men, together with the Mu‘tazilah who agree with them, alone the upholders of divine oneness and transcendence, to the exclusion of all the prophets and messengers, the Companions, the Successors, all the other leading Muslim scholars, and all the groups of leading jurists, Sufis, hadith scholars, and the various schools of theologians who do not agree with them in this negation, but explicitly affirm its opposite or something that entails its opposite?! Their statements on this fill the world, while also agreeing with the Books revealed from heaven, the self-evident innate disposition shared by the masses, and sound rational inferences free from contentiousness.

This imam, Abū ‘Abd Allāh al-Rāzī, discussed this for his followers in his book The Categories of Pleasure. He discussed intellectual pleasure, explaining that it consists in knowledge and that the noblest knowledge is knowledge of Allah. Yet this means knowledge of His Essence, attributes, and acts. On each of these, he poses a question: Is existence identical with essence, or is it something additional? Are the attributes additional to the Essence or not? Is action concomitant or temporally originated?

Then he said:

“And who has reached this gate,