Sīnā and his followers—even though they have established in “logic” what all rational people know: that what is absolute with absoluteness stipulated exists only in the mind, not in concrete reality. Their claim thus amounts to saying that the Necessary Existent does not exist in external reality, although they acknowledge what rational people do not dispute: that existence necessarily includes a being whose existence is necessary in itself.

Others say that He is absolute without any stipulation—as al-Qūnawī and others maintain. They identify Him with the “existence” predicated of the necessary and the contingent, the one and the many, the mental and the external, the eternal and the originated. He would therefore be either an attribute of created things, a part of them, or those very things themselves.

The former group identify Him with abstract “existence,” unrestricted by any qualification. This entails that He is neither necessary nor contingent, neither knowing nor ignorant, neither powerful nor powerless. Yet they also say that He is intellective and intelligible, lover and beloved. Thus they contradict themselves in their misguidance, making one into two and two into one. Likewise, they seek to affirm an existence stripped of every attribute and unrestricted by any qualification, yet they distinguish it by what belongs to no other existent.

For this reason, some of them say that the knower and knowledge are one, and that He is knowledge itself. They thus identify the knower by himself with the knower through another, and the bearer of an attribute with the attribute itself. Their contradictions are even greater than those of the Christians in their “Trinity” and “union,” through which they corrupted faith in divine oneness and the prophetic message.