The convention they have elevated to the rank of essential truths and sciences is itself sheer misguidance and a means of leading others astray. It is as though someone were to confront two identical persons and, on no ground other than his own arbitrary fiat, declare this one a believer and that one an unbeliever, this one learned and that one ignorant, this one blessed and that one wretched—without the least difference between their essences or attributes. Thus, while professing allegiance to rational analogy, they end up drawing distinctions between things that are alike and equating things that are different.

For this reason the great majority of Muslim dialecticians, and most other speculative thinkers, restrict a definition to the distinguishing description that separates the thing defined from everything else, for it is by means of that distinction that recognition is achieved. Such a description must correspond to the definiendum both in breadth and depth: it must encompass every individual and component of the thing defined while excluding whatever does not belong to it. This is the definition on which the Muslim dialecticians rely, as we have explained at length elsewhere.

As for the remaining shared attributes, they can rarely be exhaustively enumerated. Undoubtedly, the more a person knows of them, the better his knowledge of the subject described; yet every conception admits of another, more complete than it, and we have no way of knowing anything from every possible aspect.

Nor do we know all the concomitants of every created thing—or the concomitants of those concomitants ad infinitum. Every creature necessarily points to the Creator, and the Creator necessarily implies His own attributes, among them His Knowledge, which encompasses all things. Were we able to grasp even the remotest chain of a thing’s concomitants, it would follow that we knew everything, and that is impossible for human beings. Allah, exalted be He, alone knows things exactly as they are, without the possibility of addition, whereas whenever we know something there remains, of its aspects and concomitants, far more that eludes us than we grasp.

This is further clarified by their own words, as reported by Abū Ḥāmid in Miʿyār al-ʿIlm: “Connotative indication (dalālat al-taḍammun) is like the indication of the word ‘house’ for the wall, or the indication of the word ‘human being’ for ‘animal,’ and likewise the indication of every more specific attribute for …”