of corporeality, even though neither of the two attributes brings the other into being.

We have shown elsewhere that the very consideration by which one knows an animal to be a body is the same consideration by which one knows that a human being is a body. There we demonstrated that the so-called syllogism of inclusion to which they appeal is of little—or no—practical use: whatever establishes the truth of the major premise in intellectual matters simultaneously establishes the truth of its individual instances, including the minor premise, and by the same token it confirms the conclusion. Hence a person recognizes statements such as “The whole is greater than the part,” “Things equal to the same thing are equal to one another,” “Contraries cannot coexist,” and “Contradictories can neither both obtain nor both be absent.”

The Philosophers’ Concept of Tawḥīd

A clear example is their dictum, “From the One only one proceeds.” If they can first secure the premise that the Lord—exalted is He—falls under their definition of “the One,” namely, that He possesses no affirmative attribute whatsoever but is stripped of every positive reality and can be described only by sheer negation, or by expressions that amount to nothing more than negation (such as purely relational predicates), they then regard His bringing the universe into existence as a non-entity, for in their view it is merely a relation. In the same vein they declare that knowledge, the knower, the known; love, the lover, the beloved; and delight—all of these—are privations devoid of positive existence. They claim that knowledge, providence, and power are identical with the very essence of the Knower, the Powerful, the Willing; that knowledge itself is power, and power itself is providence; that all of this is love and delight; that love and delight are identical with the lover who experiences delight; and that love and delight are nothing other than knowledge and power. His knowledge of Himself, they say, is His knowledge of all things. Such assertions—and others of the same kind—form part of what they call the “Unity of the Necessary Existent.”

Refutation of Their Maxim “From the One Only One Proceeds”

Even if, for the sake of argument, one were to concede the validity of this notion they call tawḥīd—although the vast majority of rational people in every nation, once they grasp it, know by sheer reason that it is a false and self-contradictory claim—then, once it is conceded, they proceed to argue that “from the One only one proceeds,” and they present their case as follows