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One indication that the way of Ahl al-Sunnah in following the prophets leads to the truth, unlike the way of the philosophers and speculative theologians who oppose them, is this: the aim is knowledge, and the means to it is evidence. The prophets brought detailed affirmation and comprehensive negation, affirming Allah’s attributes in detail and denying that He has any equal.

The “philosophers,” however, offer detailed negation: He is not this, nor that. When it comes to affirmation, they affirm only an unspecified existence and fall into confusion over “the very first questions concerning His existence”: whether His existence is identical with His essence, an essential attribute of it, or an accidental attribute—and other such conceptual and verbal disputes.

It is well known that negation has no existence of its own, and that negation and nonexistence can be known only after knowledge of what is real and existent. Indeed, a group of speculative theologians denied that the nonexistent could be known unless it were regarded as a thing, because knowledge, they claimed, must relate to a thing.

The truth is that knowledge of nonexistence is obtained through knowledge of what exists. Thus, when we know that “there is no deity worthy of worship except Allah,” we conceive of an existing deity and know that what we have conceived is not found in anything other than Allah. Likewise, whatever else we negate, we must first conceive of it and then negate it; and we can conceive of it only