likens Him to the nonexistent and the impossible is worse than these people, for he both negates His attributes and likens Him to others. One who negates His attributes is worse than one who associates partners with Him. Allah has repeated Pharaoh’s story in several places in the Quran because people need to learn from it. Pharaoh attained such dominion and made such claims to lordship, divinity, and supremacy as none of those who negate Allah’s attributes ever matched. His ultimate fate was as Allah Most High has described.

Allah has no attribute in which anyone else is His equal. Thus, neither reasoning by analogy nor categorical reasoning that treats its individual instances as equal may be applied to Him, for that constitutes associating partners with Him by equating Him with creation. Rather, a fortiori reasoning is to be used. To Him, glorified is He, belongs the highest description in the heavens and the earth. He is therefore more deserving than anyone else of attributes of perfection, and more deserving than anyone else of being declared free of attributes of imperfection. These matters have been discussed at length elsewhere. It has also been explained that those who make Him absolute existence and existence qualified by negation, or an abstract essence, have likened Him to the most deficient mental concepts and placed Him below things that exist in external reality. Those who negate His attributes and sought to establish that the world came into being by establishing that bodies came into being have not thereby established the coming into being of anything, as has been explained in its proper place.

They then made denying that the Lord is a body their chief basis for declaring Him free of imperfections. Whoever follows this approach has not thereby established Allah’s freedom from any imperfection whatsoever. For