And everything these people or anyone else says contradicts their fundamental premise, for they are compelled to affirm multiplicity.

If they say, “Existence is one, in the sense that existing things share the designation ‘existence,’” this is correct. However, when existing things share a single designation, the existence of one is not identical to the existence of another. Rather, they share a general, universal name, just as they share the names that grammarians call generic nouns and that logicians classify as genus, species, differentia, property, and common accident.

Sharing these names necessarily entails that the individual entities are distinct and that one of the things sharing a name is not the other. This is among the considerations by which we know that the existence of the True One is distinct from the existence of created things. Indeed, this distinction is greater than the distinction between one existing thing and another. If the existence of the celestial sphere is distinct from and unlike the existence of a tiny ant or a mosquito, then the existence of the True One, Most High, is far more distinct from the existence of every created thing than the existence of that created thing is from the existence of another.

This and other considerations demonstrate the falsity of that shaykh’s statement:

“Only the One knows monotheism. Monotheism cannot be properly expressed, for it can be expressed only through something other; and whoever affirms something other has no monotheism.”

Besides being unbelief, this statement is self-contradictory. His saying, “Only one knows monotheism,” entails that there is one who knows it and that someone other than him does not know it. This distinguishes between one who knows it and one who does not, and affirms two: one who knows it and the other who does not