that are difficult and concerning which people have often erred because of the ambiguity and confusion involved.

The correct answer is that Allah’s speech is not like the speech of created beings, just as none of His attributes is like the attributes of created beings. The statement, “Sharing an essential reality does not entail sharing temporal origination,” is ambiguous. For if we say, “Allah has knowledge and we have knowledge,” or “He has power and we have power,” or “He has speech and we have speech,” or “He speaks with a voice and we speak with a voice,” and then say that the Creator’s attribute and the created being’s attribute share an essential reality, this may mean different things.

If what is meant is that their realities are numerically one and the same, this contradicts sensory perception, reason, and revelation. If what is meant is that they are alike in their essential reality and differ only in accidental attributes—as a group of speculative theologians have maintained, and as has been shown to be invalid in the discussion of al-Rāzī’s al-Arba‘īn and elsewhere—this too is utterly false. It entails that the essential reality of the Creator’s essence, Mighty and Majestic, is like the essential reality of the essences of created beings.

If, however, what is meant is that they share what is denoted by the terms knowledge, power, and speech, this is correct. Likewise, when it is said that He exists or that He has an essence, they share what is denoted by existence and essence. But this shared meaning is a universal, which exists as a universal only in minds, not in concrete entities. Thus, in external reality there is no single thing shared by two created beings in the way that particulars share their universals. This differs from the way parts share in a whole. For a distinction must be drawn between dividing a universal into its particulars—as in dividing the category of animal into