and thus they drew analogies for the Lord of the worlds, went astray, and could find no way forward.

They are misguided in these analogies in several respects:

First: Upon examination, everything they use in these analogies—matter together with form, universals together with particulars, and existence together with subsistence—amounts to one thing, not two. They have made one thing into two, just as they make two things into one in matters such as Allah’s attributes: they identify knowledge with the knower, knowledge with the known, knowledge with power, and knowledge with will. When a rational person reflects upon such claims, it becomes clear to him that these people are among the most ignorant concerning divine matters and among the greatest proponents of falsehood. Yet they and their followers entertain extravagant, sweeping claims about themselves, just as their brethren, the esotericist Qarmatians, claim to be infallible imams like the prophets, although they are among the most ignorant, misguided, and unbelieving of people.

(Second): On every one of these assumptions, they make His existence conditional upon the existence of something else that He did not originate. The existence of universals in external reality is conditional upon particulars; the existence of matter is conditional upon form, and vice versa; and the existence of concrete entities is conditional upon their subsistence, fixed in nonexistence. On every assumption, therefore, their position entails that the Necessary Existent is dependent upon something He did not originate. Whatever depends for its existence upon something else that it did not create cannot be necessarily existent in itself. This is clear.