And self-evident truths are to be taken only from sound hearts and upright minds, uncorrupted by the beliefs they have uncritically adopted and the aims to which they have become accustomed.

Those who affirm say that anyone among humankind whose innate disposition is sound, upon hearing the deniers’ position, knows its falsity self-evidently; the sharper a person’s intellect, the more firmly he knows it to be false. Indeed, they say that the particular proposition to be established—“Allah Most High is above the world”—is known through innate disposition and self-evident necessity, and that the falsity of its opposite is likewise known through innate disposition and self-evident necessity. Thus, they know both the general proposition and the particular proposition self-evidently: they know that the Creator is above the world, and they know that it is impossible for two beings to exist without one being either separate from the other or interpenetrating it. They know that if He is not separate from it, He must interpenetrate it and share its locus, thereby entailing indwelling and union.

There is no doubt that this is the understanding held by the great majority of human peoples. The position of those who affirm His being above the world and separate from it is clear. As for those who do not acknowledge His being above it and separate from it, most understand the opposite only to mean that He is everywhere. If the negation of both alternatives were presented to them, they could neither conceive nor comprehend it.

This is the argument employed by the accomplished exponents of indwelling and union, such as al-Sadr al-Qūnawī and others like him, against those among them who deny this. He said: “You have conceded to us that He is neither outside the world nor separate from it. Whatever is not so can only be conceived as being the existence of contingent beings itself, or as being within the existence of contingent beings; for only one or the other is conceivable.”

Then he and others like him say: “He is absolute existence, and the distinction between Him and things is the distinction between