As for “languages,” this usage occurs in the languages of all peoples—Arabs, Romans, Persians, Turks, Berbers, and others—and is literal in all their languages. Indeed, they know that Allah is more entitled than the servant to be described as possessing power and performing acts, and that the name “Powerful” applies literally to the Lord with greater justification than it does to the servant. The same holds for the other most beautiful names.
When people say that the two named subjects have something in common, they do not mean that something shared by the Creator and the created being exists outside the mind. For in external reality, there is nothing shared even by two created beings, let alone by the Creator and a created being. This misconception arose among certain adherents of “Greek logic” and their followers, who supposed that unqualified quiddities shared by perceptible individuals exist in external reality. Some, like Plato, regard these quiddities as separate from concrete individuals; others, like Aristotle, Ibn Sīnā, and their like, maintain that they are inseparable from them.
We have discussed this at length elsewhere and explained the errors into which their followers fell on this point in “logic and metaphysics.” Some groups of speculative thinkers have even maintained that saying the Lord’s existence is identical with His quiddity—as is the position of those who affirm the divine attributes and the theologians who uphold them, such as Ibn Kullāb, al-Ashʿarī, and others—entails that the term “existence” is applied to the two in a purely equivocal sense. Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Rāzī attributed this position to al-Ashʿarī, Abū al-Husayn al-Basrī, and others. Yet this is not their position;