They deny all affirmative attributes, declaring that He has neither life, nor knowledge, nor power, nor speech—yet at the very same time they describe Him as an intellector, the intelligible, and the intellect itself; as one who delights, the enjoyer, and delight itself; as lover, beloved, and love itself. They contend that every one of these attributes is identical to the others—delight is intellect, and intellect is love—and that each attribute is identical to the One described: knowledge is the Knower, delight is the one delighted, and love is the lover. Such statements concerning the attributes of the Necessary Existent are so patently incoherent that anyone who grasps them correctly will, by that mere apprehension, know with immediate certainty that they are false.

We have already treated this subject at length, clarifying what forced them to such assertions and discussing their theory of composition. We showed that most of the earlier philosophers before Aristotle, and many later thinkers—such as Abū al-Barakāt, author of al-Muʿtabar—rejected these claims and refuted those who advanced them. The entire matter springs from their allegation that affirming attributes entails an impossible composition. They took this notion from the Muʿtazilites; it is not found in the words of Aristotle and his followers. We have exposed its unsoundness in a separate treatise on the philosophers’ concept of divine oneness, as well as in our commentaries on the Isfahāniyyah, the Ṣafadiyyah, and elsewhere.

They went on to build their argument on the premise that the One cannot be both agent and recipient, for that would imply composition; and that nothing but a single effect can proceed from the One, for the emergence of two effects would demand two distinct sources—the source of C differing from the source of B—and that, again, would necessitate the impossible composition.

Thus the whole of their discourse on divine unity and attributes revolves around the single term “composition.” We have analyzed it in detail and shown how ambiguous the term is, for composition is of five kinds:

1. composition of an essence from existence and quiddity;
2. composition from a universal description, such as the compound of genus and differentia;