the advocates of oneness, for nearness and distance require two entities, one of which draws near to the other. A single entity neither draws near to itself nor moves away from itself.
As for the statement:
“Monotheism has no tongue, yet all tongues are its tongue,”
this, too, is a saying of the advocates of oneness. Besides being unbelief, it is self-contradictory. For it is necessarily known in Islam that the tongue of polytheism cannot be the tongue of monotheism. Nor are the words of the polytheists who said:
“Never abandon your gods, and never abandon Wadd, Suwāʿ, Yaghūth, Yaʿūq, or Nasr,”
or those who said:
“We worship them only so that they may bring us nearer to Allah,”
or those who said:
“We will not abandon our gods on your word, nor will we believe in you.”
“We say only that some of our gods have afflicted you with evil,”
or those who said:
“Burn him and support your gods,”
or the words of others like them, the tongue of monotheism.
As for this statement’s contradiction of their own fundamental premise: if existence is one, affirming multiplicity is a contradiction. Thus, if someone says, “Existence is one,” and another says, “It is not one; rather, it is multiple,” these two statements contradict each other, so neither can be identical to the other.
When someone says, “All tongues are its tongue,” he explicitly affirms multiplicity by saying “all tongues.” This entails that one tongue is not identical to another. Multiplicity is thus established, and oneness disproved.