the unity of existence, who say: “The Creator’s very existence is identical to that of the created being.” This is the view expressed by Ibn ‘Arabī, Ibn Sab‘īn, al-Qūnawī, al-Tilimsānī, Ibn al-Fārid, and others like them. This view is necessarily known to be false on both scriptural and rational grounds.

(Eleventh point: Many people make this their principal proof from revelation that temporally originated events have a beginning, and that such events, as a class, were preceded by nonexistence, since they have found nothing explicitly stating this in the Quran and Sunnah. Yet they attribute this view to Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Such claims appear in the books of most adherents of the speculative theology introduced into Islam—a theology condemned by the early generations, through which its adherents contradicted revelation and reason.

Some report this as a consensus of the Muslims, although they have no transmitted evidence for it from any of the Companions or those who followed them in righteousness, nor from the Quran and Sunnah, let alone evidence that it is the position of all Muslims. Some suppose that anyone who disagrees with this has affirmed the eternity of the world and sided with the eternalist philosophers. They suppose this because they have examined many works of speculative theology and found only two positions in them:

The position of the philosophers who affirm the eternity of the world, whether its form or its matter, regardless of whether it is said to exist independently or to be an effect of something else;

And the position of those speculative theologians who refuted them—the Jahmiyyah, the Mu‘tazilah, and the Karrāmiyyah—who say that