His creatures, thereby becoming one of those who set up equals to their Lord and associate partners with Him. This is among the gravest forms of false analogy. Such people say:

“By Allah, we were clearly astray
when we made you equal to the Lord of all worlds.”

For this reason, some of the early generations said: “The first to employ analogy was Iblīs, and the sun and moon were worshipped only through analogies.” That is, analogies of this kind, in which something is likened to what differs from it, as in the analogies of the polytheists. Anyone acquainted with people’s discussions of rational matters will see that most of the error of those philosophers and speculative theologians who went astray arose from such false analogies. In these, two things are equated because they share certain attributes, despite differences between them that entail the greatest divergence. Consider their discussions of the existence of the Lord and the existence of created beings: these contain inconsistencies that we have discussed at length elsewhere.

What we have said about leasing assumes, for the sake of argument, their assertion that the sale of nonexistent objects is impermissible. This is the second premise, which may be addressed in two ways.

The first is to say: We do not concede the validity of this premise. There is nothing in the Book of Allah or the Sunnah of His Messenger—nor, indeed, anything reported from any of the Companions—stating that the sale of nonexistent things