O ‘Adī, do you know of any god other than Allah? O ‘Adī, what makes you flee? Does the declaration ‘Allah is greater’ make you flee? Do you know of anything greater than Allah?” This demonstrates the correctness of those jurists who say that this expression may not be replaced with “Allah is great,” though a fuller explanation belongs elsewhere.

He also said:

“Glorify the name of your Lord, the Most High.”

The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said: “Use this in your prostration.” Allah is therefore the Most High and the Greatest. Since knowledge corresponds to its object, knowledge and understanding of Him must be the greatest and highest of all sciences.

Second: Allah, glorified is He, is the Truth, existing through Himself. Everything other than Him is part of His creation, subject to His lordship and subdued under His power. He creates all things and brings their causes into being. Knowledge of Him is therefore the foundation and cause of knowledge of everything else, just as He Himself is their foundation and cause. Knowledge of a cause yields knowledge of the one who brings it about.

Third: To know absolute existence is to know what He has in common with everything else. This is knowledge of the middle term used in comparing Him with His creation. Clearly, this does not provide knowledge of His reality or of the reality of anything else; it provides only knowledge of an attribute shared by both. How, then, can knowledge of a shared attribute be higher than knowledge of the reality of each, together with all that distinguishes each from other kinds and individual entities?

Likewise, knowledge of absolute essence and of all such shared notions belongs to this same category.