“These veiled people do not see this.” But if there is nothing other than Him, nothing besides Him, then who is veiled, and who veils? Who is not veiled, and from what has he been veiled?

They have thus affirmed four things: people who are veiled, people who are not veiled, and something disclosed to the latter but concealed from the former. How can this be reconciled with their claim that there are neither two things nor two existences?

A trustworthy man told me that he said to al-Tilimsānī, “According to your position, then, there is no difference between a man’s wife, his mother, and his daughter?”

He replied, “Yes, they are all the same to us. But these veiled people said, ‘It is forbidden,’ so we said, ‘It is forbidden to you.’”

They were then asked: “Who addresses the veiled people? Is he they themselves, or someone other than them? If they are he himself, then he has forbidden it to himself when he claims that it is forbidden to them but not to him. If they are other than him, then he has affirmed two distinct entities, whereas according to them there is nothing other.”

These people have confused unity in kind with numerical unity. For one may say, “Existence is one,” just as one says, “Humanity is one, and animality is one,” meaning a single universal. But a universal is universal only in the mind, not in external reality. They supposed that this universal existed externally, then supposed that it was Allah. Yet no universal exists externally as a universal; it is universal only in the mind. If a universal is posited as existing externally, it is a part of particular entities and inheres in them; it is not distinct and self-subsisting. Thus, an animal’s animal nature and a human being’s human nature, whether conceived as particular or unrestricted, are attributes of that being. It is impossible for an attribute of something to be its creator. Even if