a man used to recite frequently, ‘Say: He is Allah, the One.’ The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, ‘Ask him why he does that.’ He replied, ‘Because it describes the Most Merciful, and I love it.’ The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, ‘Tell him that Allah loves him.’”

Anyone who describes something by a quality it does not possess is lying. Thus, whoever describes Allah as Creator, Provider, knowing and powerful, yet also says that He Himself does not possess knowledge and power, or does not perform the acts of creation and giving life, has described Him by something while saying that He does not possess it. He has thereby contradicted his own description of his Lord and combined two contradictories, saying, “He possesses this quality; He does not possess this quality.”

This is the reality of the statements made by those who deny the attributes: they affirm things that are true, yet say what entails their negation. They thus combine two contradictories, and the contradiction becomes apparent in their statements. In effect, they say that He exists but does not exist, knows but does not know, and is alive but is not alive. For this reason, the extremists among them refrain from both affirmation and negation: they describe Him neither affirmatively nor negatively, as has been explained at length elsewhere. Yet it is known that excluding both negation and affirmation is also false, for two contradictories can neither both hold nor both fail to hold.

The point here is that this sound “premise”—that if He created it in a subject, it would be an attribute of that subject—is indeed sound. The early generations, their followers—the people of the Sunnah—and the majority affirm it. The Muʿtazilah and the Ashʿarīs, however, contradict themselves concerning it, as explained above.