Worse than these are the Sabians and the philosophers who say that Allah has never spoken—neither with speech subsisting in His essence nor with speech He utters by His will and power: neither speech beginningless in kind nor speech beginningless as a particular entity, neither originated nor created. Rather, His speech, in their view, is what emanates into the souls of the prophets. They say that He spoke to Moses from the heaven of his intellect. They may also say that He, exalted be He, knows universals but not particulars, for He knows them only in a universal manner. Yet they also say that He knows Himself and knows what He does.

Their statement that He knows Himself and what He has brought into existence is true, as He, exalted be He, says:

“Does He who created not know, when He is the Most Subtle, the All-Aware?”

But their further claim that He does not know particular individual entities is ignorance and contradiction. His holy Self is a particular entity, the celestial spheres are particular entities, and everything that exists is a particular entity. If He did not know particulars, He would know nothing that exists, since universals exist as universals only in minds, not in external reality. Thus, whoever knows only universals knows nothing that exists. Exalted is Allah, far above what the wrongdoers say!

What drove them to this deviation was their attempt to avoid affirming the occurrence of new states in the Creator, exalted be He. Yet these same people say that temporal events subsist in that which is beginningless and that temporal events have no beginning. They denied this of the Creator, however, because they believed that He has no attributes, but is instead absolute existence. They said that knowledge is identical with the knower, that power is identical with the one who possesses it, that knowledge and the knower are one and the same, and that the one who wills and the will