real meanings subsisting in Him, then there is no knowledge, hearing, sight, might or power. There is nothing but an essence stripped of attributes, and created things. Within this bare essence, there is nothing that admits of comparison in either excellence or equality. As for created things, the question was not whether some are superior to others: everyone knows that they are, and no rational person is in doubt about it.”

The same applies to anyone who identifies some of His attributes with others, or identifies an attribute with the One possessing it—for example, someone who says, “Knowledge is power, and knowledge and power are themselves the One who knows and has power,” as some of the Jahmī philosophers and others maintain.

Or someone may say:

“All His speech is a single meaning subsisting in His essence. It is the command enjoining everything commanded and the report of everything reported. If expressed in Arabic, it is the Quran; if expressed in Hebrew, it is the Torah; and if expressed in Syriac, it is the Gospel. The meaning of the Verse of the Throne and the verse on debt is one and the same. Command and prohibition are relational attributes of speech, not distinct kinds of it. Rather, the very speech that is a command is the very speech that is a prohibition; only the relation differs.”

Such is the doctrine professed by the Kullābiyyah. Although most rational people say that merely conceiving it is enough to recognize its falsity, on this view one cannot answer that some of Allah’s speech is superior to other parts, or that some is equal to others, because, according to them, speech is one and the same entity