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As for his associate, al-Sadr al-Fakhr al-Rūmī, he does not maintain that existence is something additional to quiddity. He was more deeply versed in speculative reasoning and theology than his master, but greater in unbelief, poorer in knowledge and faith, and less familiar with Islam and the sayings of the shaykhs. Since their doctrine was unbelief, the more adept anyone became in it, the greater his unbelief.

When he saw that distinguishing the existence of things from their entities was untenable—while holding that Allah is existence and that some distinction between the two was necessary—he distinguished between the absolute and the determinate. In his view, Allah is absolute existence, which is neither determinate nor differentiated. When it becomes determinate and differentiated, it is creation, whether it becomes determinate at the level of divinity or elsewhere.

This position expresses unbelief more explicitly than the first and is the very substance of the doctrine of Pharaoh and the Qarmatians, although the first is more flawed in its distinction between the existence of things and their fixed reality. For, on the first position, it is possible to posit that the Real has an existence apart from the entities of contingent beings, and that this existence emanated upon them. This would entail an acknowledgment of the self-subsisting Lord, who has no need of His creation, even though the position contains unbelief insofar as it identifies the creature with the Creator and that which is subject to lordship with the Lord. Indeed, it does not affirm any creation at all. Even so, I have not seen him explicitly affirm the existence of the Lord as distinct from the existence subsisting in the entities of contingent beings.