that His creatures possess, so He is all the more deserving and worthy of possessing attributes of perfection. Were He not to possess attributes of perfection, His creatures would be more perfect than Him. They have used this very argument concerning “the question of speech,” and it applies equally to His speaking the Quran in both its wording and its meaning.

They have also argued that, were He not to possess attributes of perfection, He would possess their opposites, which are attributes of deficiency—and Allah is far above such things. Thus, were He not described as possessing life, He would be described as dead; were He not described as possessing knowledge, He would be described as ignorant; were He not described as possessing speech, He would be described as mute; and were He not described as possessing sight and hearing, He would be described as blind and deaf.

Here the heretics raise a “well-known objection”: these opposites do not stand in the opposition of negation and affirmation—such that negating one necessarily establishes the other—but rather in the opposition of “privation and possession.” This means the absence of something from a subject that is by nature capable of possessing it, as with the absence of blindness from an animal capable of it. An inanimate object, however, is, according to them, described as neither blind nor sighted, because it lacks the capacity for either.

This objection has confounded many later scholars—even Abū al-Hasan al-Āmidī and other speculative theologians like him—and they thought that it could not be answered. The answers to it have been discussed at length elsewhere. Among the “answers” to this, he mentioned the following: this entails an even greater deficiency. For something capable of possessing sight or blindness, knowledge or ignorance, and speech or muteness is more perfect than something incapable of either member of these pairs, since an animal is more perfect than an inanimate object. Thus, if possessing attributes of deficiency is a defect when possessing attributes of perfection is possible, then the absence of