and His undergoing these changes—from deficiency to perfection and from perfection to deficiency. If, however, these things are outside His essence, then they were nonexistent, and, according to them, He did not create them outside Himself. How, then, can this be explained?

(The fourth point)

The “knot of the reality of prophethood” and what accompanies it must be either a self-subsisting entity or an attribute of Him or of another. If it is self-subsisting, it must be either Allah or something other than Him. If it is Allah, then Allah would be the manifest point, the reality of prophethood, and the relational spirit.

He subsequently said that He placed the relational spirit in the form of an act of His essence and gave Muhammad the knot of his prophethood. Thus, He would have made Himself the form of His own act and given Muhammad His own essence. Besides being among the clearest and most repugnant forms of unbelief, this is contradictory: who gives, and who is given, if He has given His own essence to another?

If these things are self-subsisting entities other than Allah, then, whether they are angels or anything else, every entity other than Allah is one of His creatures—made by Him and subject to His lordship. Allah is the Creator of everything. Yet he has represented the Real as appearing as one who describes Himself, and as the one designated by the name “the Most Merciful.” Thus, the one designated by the name “the Most Merciful,” who describes Himself, would be a created being. This is explicit unbelief, worse than the deviation of those who:

“They were told, ‘Prostrate to the Most Merciful,’ and they said, ‘What is the Most Merciful?’”

And worse than the deviation of those of whom it was said:

“They disbelieve in the Most Merciful.”

For those people disbelieved in His name and His attribute while acknowledging the Lord of the worlds. These people, however, acknowledge the name but make the one it designates one of His creatures.

If, on the other hand, what is meant by this reality and what accompanies it is an attribute, then it must be either an attribute of Allah