What we have pointed out helps make clear that the classifications of existing things presented by the author of al-Muhassil and others like him, according to the views of the philosophers and speculative theologians, are all incomplete. Each of these two groups falls short of its predecessors.

As for the speculative theologians, their classifications do not follow the approach indicated by the Quran and Sunnah and followed by the early generations of the Muslim community. Likewise, these philosophers who follow Aristotle did not follow the approach of the great philosophers of antiquity. Those earlier philosophers held that this world came into being. They maintained that above this world there is another world, which they described in some of the same terms the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—used to describe Paradise. They also affirmed bodily resurrection, as can be found in the statements of Socrates, Thales, and other leading philosophers. It has been reported that Aristotle was the first among them to maintain that the world has no beginning.

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These newly coined, ambiguous terms used in negation—such as “composite,” “compounded,” “divisible,” and the like—have now become expressions through which anyone wishing to deny any of the names and attributes that Allah has affirmed for Himself conveys his intent. Someone unfamiliar with what he means may therefore imagine that his intention is to declare the Lord free of imperfection in the manner taught by the Quran, namely, by affirming His absolute oneness and self-sufficiency. Yet he may have included within those terms whatever he himself considers must be denied