and if some of them mean by it that a thing is real in itself, this is not its very reality—what it actually is—as has been established elsewhere. It has also been established that any philosopher or speculative theologian who says that the Lord’s reality is His existence or the necessity of His existence, or claims to have known His reality, has made a grievous error. This is comparable to saying that the reality of all other beings is their being contingent. These people are far removed from Allah, veiled from knowing Him. They have known only one universal attribute among His attributes, yet imagined that they had known His reality.
This makes it clear that when someone says that the highest science is metaphysics, which examines existence and its concomitants, it is highest only in the mind of someone seeking to know Allah by analogy with His creation. It is not highest in itself, nor is its object of knowledge the highest. Nor is it highest in the estimation of those who know the realities of existing things, or those who know Allah through their innate disposition—let alone those who know Him through revealed law, through sainthood, through revelation and prophethood, through being entrusted with a divine message, through speech, or through seeing Him.
Thus, since the ultimate attainment of the Sabian philosophers and their highest knowledge was absolute existence, and since the roots of Jahmism and the denial of the Lord’s attributes were derived from the Sabians, and since these adherents of the unity of existence were originally Jahmīs, while the elements of Christianity in them—Christianity being akin to Sabianism—created an affinity between them and the Sabians, their object of worship and their god became