Thus, when it is said that Allah, glorified and exalted be He, is living, knowing and powerful, He is being described as the Ever-Living, the All-Knowing, the All-Powerful. When it is said that He exists and is necessary in Himself, He, glorified be He, is being described as possessing existence and necessity. There is therefore no actually existing thing shared between Him and anything else. Nor is He composed of two parts, or of constitutive attributes that form parts of His existence, or anything similar among the alleged forms of composition that are impossible even in a created being—and still more emphatically impossible in the Creator.

However, the term “composition” is ambiguous. These people include within it a thing’s possession of its inseparable attributes, although this is not what is ordinarily understood by “composition.” They have introduced their own technical usage of this term, without precedent among the authorities on the language or any group of scholars. They have made “composition” encompass “five kinds”:

First: composition from existence and quiddity, because they suppose that the external existence of every contingent being is distinct from its quiddity. Whenever the “internal part of quiddity” is understood as what enters into this conception, and its “external concomitant” as what this conception necessarily entails, these are the two meanings signified by the expression.

Second: composition from genus and differentia, as when they say that a human being is composed of animality and rationality. They may also include composition from a general meaning and a specific meaning, calling it composition from a genus and a differentia, or from a specific property and a common accident.

Third: composition from essence and attributes, as in that which is designated as living, knowing and capable