—who fashioned, and the One who ordained and then guided—; and Moses said, “Our Lord is He who gave everything its creation, then guided it” (Q 20:50).

Just as concrete, external entities are among the signs that attest to His existence, so the concepts formed in the mind, insofar as they are themselves real existents, also fall under this very category; and insofar as those mental images correspond to things outside the mind, they belong to the first category as well.

However, when a person grasps the notion of “man” or “animal” in the abstract, he does not thereby know any particular individual. Likewise, someone who comes to know a “necessary being,” an “absolute agent,” or an “absolute self-sufficient one” in the abstract does not thereby know the Lord of all worlds Himself, nor what distinguishes Him from everything else.

That, in fact, is what His signs signify: they entail His very Essence, and the mere act of conceiving that Essence rules out the possibility of any rival or partner in it. Everything other than Him is an indicator of His Essence and a sign pointing to Him, for it is contingent upon Him; and whatever is contingent upon something serves as evidence of that upon which it depends. No contingent thing can come to be unless His Essence is already realized; therefore all of them depend upon the Lord Himself, serve as proofs of Him, and stand as His signs.

Yet the way certain thinkers argue confines their inference to an absolute, universal concept that exists only in the mind. By their demonstration they never arrive at what is unique to the Lord, exalted is He. The “Necessary Existent” they establish, when examined closely, turns out to be nothing more than a universal notion, not peculiar to the Lord at all—indeed, some of them reduce it to bare existence.

The probative force of the a fortiori analogy (qiyās al-awlā) in affirming the attributes of perfection:

By contrast, the a fortiori analogy employed by the early generations, following the Qur’an’s lead, shows that one must affirm for Him attributes of perfection wholly free of deficiency—attributes that are more sublime than those known to belong to any other being, with a disparity that the intellect cannot measure, just as it cannot measure the gulf between Creator and creation. If the mind can recognize, among created things, degrees of excellence so vast they defy calculation, and if it knows that God’s excellence over every creature is greater than any creature’s excellence over another, then it becomes clear that whatever is affirmed for the Lord is incomparably greater than what is affirmed for anything else, beyond all reckoning—so that the a fortiori analogy imparts this understanding.