the philosophers—and we found in these nothing but sheer negation of the divine attributes—and recognized that the central tenet of their doctrines and the ultimate conclusion of their creed was what the leading heretics before them had openly declared: “The celestial sphere revolves, and heaven is empty”; that their assertion that He, exalted is He, is everywhere and in everything excluded neither the belly of a dog, nor the belly of a pig, nor a latrine, in their flight from affirming His attributes and their departure from establishing their reality; and that their assertions, “He hears without hearing, sees without sight, knows without knowledge, and has power without power; a deity with no self, no person, and no form,” followed by “He has no life,” and then “He is not a thing, for if He were a thing, He would resemble other things,” circled around the declaration of the leading heretics of old, “The Creator is neither an attribute nor a non-attribute”—they feared for the hearts of the weaker Muslims