the natural universal—it is an effect of Allah Most High’s existence and is among His creations and handiworks. They therefore mistake created existence for the Creator’s existence. In some respects, they resemble someone who sees sunlight on the ground, walls and mountains and mistakes it for the sun itself in the sky, even though these rays are separate from the sun and subsist in bodies other than it.

Although created things possess existence and reality, that existence is created by Allah and distinct from Him. At most, if existence is assumed to be something additional to essences, existence within existent things would be like sunlight within bodies facing the sun.

This error thus arises from deficient knowledge of, and faith in, the Lord who is distinct from created things, and from the heart’s witnessing the existence brought into being by Him, which pervades created things. They consequently mistake the one for the other. Their error is reinforced by what they have heard from the philosophers and those who agree with them: that the Necessary Existent is absolute existence, that He is neither within the world nor outside it, and similar doctrines of the Jahmiyyah. Thus they did not witness