…and we have also shown how unsound they are. For this very reason, when Abū al-Barakāt discerned the flaw in Aristotle’s position, he devoted a separate treatise to the question of knowledge and, in his work al-Muʿtabar, examined some of Aristotle’s statements, giving him a measure of refutation—though the issue is actually far graver than Abū al-Barakāt allowed. Their chief argument for denying divine knowledge is that to affirm it would entail multiplicity and change.

By “multiplicity” they mean the affirmation of attributes. Yet Ibn Sīnā and others affirm that Allah knows Himself and the necessary concomitants of His essence—individually, such as the celestial spheres, and in general, such as all other beings—so they end up with the very plurality of attributes they sought to avoid. They themselves say that He is ʿāqil (intellector), maʿqūl (intelligible), and ʿaql (intellect); ʿāshiq (lover), maʿshūq (beloved), and ʿishq (love); laḏīdh (delighting), multadhdh (delighted), and laḏdha (delight); and sometimes they add mubtahij (exultant). These are clearly multiple notions. Yet they persist in claiming, “knowledge is love, it is power, it is delight,” thereby making every attribute identical to every other. Their obstinacy then goes further: “knowledge is the knower, love is the lover, delight is the delighted,” making the attributes identical with the One described by them. When al-Ṭūsī, the commentator on al-Ishārāt, noticed the consequences that befell its author, he adopted a different course, asserting that knowledge of the intelligibles is identical to the intelligibles themselves. In truth, they have never produced a single proof for negating the attributes beyond their imagined fear of “composition,” and we have already exposed the fallacy of that idea from many angles.

As for “change,” they argue that if Allah knew changing things, His knowledge that something will be must differ from His knowledge that it already was; thus, they say, He would become a locus for temporal events. They have absolutely no proof—neither clear evidence nor even a plausible doubt—for denying these consequences. They reject them only because they have already rejected the attributes, not for any reason unique to this question. This differs from those who denied such change among the Kullābiyyah and the like. Holding that no temporal events can subsist in the Eternal, they reasoned: “If events were to subsist in Him, He would never be free of them, and whatever is never free of events is itself temporal.” Later followers of that school—such as al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, and others—showed the unsoundness of the first premise, which the majority of rational people reject, for a subject capable of receiving a quality can indeed be free both of that quality and of its opposite. The second premise, however, is the argument used by the mutakallimūn among the Jahmiyyah, the Qadariyyah, and those who agreed with them in asserting the origination of bodies on the ground that bodies are inseparable from events; they said, “Whatever is not free of…"