but establishes only a universal. The very conception of a universal does not preclude its applying to more than one individual, whereas knowledge of the Necessary Existent precludes this. Whoever has not conceived of that which cannot apply to more than one individual has not come to know Allah.

Anyone who attributes to the Lord knowledge of universals alone—as Ibn Sīnā and others like him claim—and regards this as a perfection of the Lord will, all the more, regard it as a perfection of the soul, especially if he says: “The soul perceives only universals; it is the body that perceives particulars.” This is ignorance in the extreme. These universals, through which existing particulars cannot be known, contain no perfection whatsoever. The soul desires knowledge of universals only to attain, through them, comprehensive knowledge of particulars. If this is not achieved, the soul finds no joy in that knowledge.

The fourth point:

It may be said: Suppose that the soul is perfected through abstract universals, as they claim. What they discuss in what they consider the highest science, which examines existence and its concomitants, does not meet this description.

Merely conceiving the meaning of existence is self-evident—so much so that, in their view, its obviousness dispenses with the need for a definition. This, then, is not what is sought; rather, what is sought is its divisions. Its very divisions into necessary and contingent, substance and accident, cause and effect, beginningless and temporally originated are more specific than what the term “existence” denotes. Merely dividing a general concept in the mind into categories, without knowing those categories, does not yield any great, lofty universal knowledge beyond the conception of existence. Once you know these categories, that knowledge is not knowledge of an object that admits of neither change nor transformation. They have no evidence whatsoever establishing that the world has always been, and will always remain, as it is. And all