or neither existent nor nonexistent. It is impossible for a thing to be described as combining existence and nonexistence, life and death, or knowledge and ignorance; likewise, it is impossible to describe it as having neither existence nor nonexistence, neither life nor death, and neither knowledge nor ignorance.”

If you say, “Denying both contradictories is impossible only where the subject is capable of either. These pairs are opposed as privation and possession, not as negation and affirmation. A wall, for example, is called neither blind nor sighted, neither living nor dead, because it is not capable of either,” you are told:

“First, this does not hold for existence and nonexistence. All rational people agree that these are opposed as negation and affirmation: denying either necessarily establishes the other. As for what you have mentioned concerning life and death, and knowledge and ignorance, this is a terminological convention adopted by the Peripatetic philosophers. Verbal conventions are no grounds for denying rational truths. Allah Most High has said:

‘And those they invoke other than Allah create nothing, and they themselves are created.’

‘They are dead, not alive, and they do not perceive when they will be resurrected.’

“He thus called inanimate things dead. This usage is well known in Arabic and other languages.”

Second, you are told:

“That which cannot be characterized by life or death, blindness or sight, or similar opposing attributes is more deficient than that which can. A blind person who is capable of sight is more perfect than an inanimate thing incapable of either. You have therefore fled from likening Him to living creatures capable of possessing attributes of perfection, only to describe Him with the attributes of inanimate things incapable of possessing them.