For when an interrogative particle precedes a negative particle, the question calls for acknowledgment, as in His words:

“Have We not expanded your breast for you?”

“Have We not given him two eyes?”

“Has the news of those before them not reached them?”

There are many similar examples. Pharaoh’s question, by contrast, expresses denial rather than calling for acknowledgment: it contains only an interrogative particle, and the context indicates that it expresses denial.

If it is asked:

“If knowledge and acknowledgment of Him are inherent in every innate disposition, how can so many speculative thinkers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, deny this, when they claim to be the very ones who establish rational proofs concerning theological questions?”

The first answer is:

The first people known in Islam to deny this knowledge were the adherents of the speculative theology that the early generations unanimously condemned: the Jahmiyyah and the Qadariyyah. The early generations of this ummah regarded them as among the most misguided and ignorant sects. Yet many of their principles spread among later thinkers who agree with the early generations on many matters in which their own Jahmī predecessors opposed those generations. Some people thus came to suppose that this position originally came from Muslim scholars. That is not so: it first came from those whom the leading authorities of the religion and the Muslim scholars condemned.

The second answer is:

A person may possess knowledge, intentions, and other attributes without knowing that they are present within him. For an attribute’s presence in the soul is distinct from