The early Muʿtazilites who preceded Abū ʿAlī maintained that the name in question is used literally of the Creator and only figuratively of the creature.

A group drawn from the Jahmiyyah, the Bāṭiniyyah, and certain philosophers asserted the reverse: for them it is figurative when applied to the Creator and literal when applied to the creature.

The majority of the various schools, however, hold that it is literal in both cases. This is the view adopted by the speculative theologians among the Muʿtazilah, the Ashʿarites, the Karrāmiyyah, the jurists, the ḥadīth scholars, the Sufis, and many philosophers.

Yet a good number of those who espouse this third position fall into self-contradiction. They concede that some terms—such as “existent,” “soul,” “essence,” and “reality”—are literal, but dispute others on the basis of objections circulated by those who deny all such predications. The argument for what they reject is identical to the argument for what they affirm; their failure lies in not recognizing the parity between the two cases. To repudiate every one of these names would entail that nothing whatsoever could be said to exist.

It is well known that what exists divides into Necessary and possible, eternal and temporal, self-sufficient and needy, produced and unproduced. The existence of the possible necessitates the existence of the Necessary; the existence of the temporal necessitates the existence of the eternal; the existence of the needy necessitates the existence of the self-sufficient; and the existence of the produced necessitates the existence of the unproduced. Thus there is a common element shared by the two kinds of existence, while the Necessary is distinguished by what is unique to it—and the same pattern holds for all the other pairs.

Analogical (mushakkik) names are, in virtue of their shared element, univocal. Hence the earlier dialecticians among the philosophers and others did not coin a separate term for “analogical” at all; the word “univocal” (mutawāṭiʾ) covered the entire field. What we now call “analogical univocity” is therefore a subdivision of general univocity, standing in contrast to strict or specific univocity.

Accordingly, every analogical term must posit a universal element common to all its instances—this is what is meant by “general univocity.” Such universality exists solely as an abstraction in the mind; that, precisely, is what their demonstrative syllogism is meant to establish.