These people say that the Christians disbelieved only because they confined this identification to Christ, saying:

“Allah is the Messiah.”

Everything the Christians say about Christ, these people say about Allah. The Christians’ unbelief is but one part of theirs. When the aforementioned book was read to the most eminent of their later figures, someone said to him, “This book contradicts the Quran.” He replied, “The entire Quran is polytheism. Monotheism is found only in these words of ours.” He meant that the Quran distinguishes between the Lord and the servant, whereas, for them, the reality of monotheism is that the Lord is the servant.

The questioner then asked him, “What difference, then, is there between my wife and my daughter?” He replied, “There is no difference. But these veiled people said, ‘It is forbidden,’ so we said, ‘It is forbidden for you.’”

To describe their doctrine as unbelief does not adequately convey its nature, for unbelief is a category encompassing forms of varying degrees. Indeed, every disbeliever’s unbelief is but one part of theirs. Thus, when their leader was told, “You are a Nusayrī,” he replied, “Nusayr is a part of me.”

ʿAbd Allah ibn al-Mubārak used to say, “We can recount the statements of the Jews and Christians, but we cannot recount the statements of the Jahmiyyah.” These people are worse than those Jahmiyyah: the furthest the latter went was to say that Allah is everywhere, whereas these people say that He is the very existence of every place. They do not recognize two existing entities, one indwelling and the other the locus of that indwelling.

Thus they said, “Adam’s relation to Allah is like that of the pupil to the eye.” Muslims, Jews, and Christians know, as a necessarily established teaching of the religion of the messengers, that whoever says of any human being that he is a part of Allah is a disbeliever in every faith, for the Christians did not say this