However, when speculative theologians began discussing this subject, they said:

“One may say that it is dhāt—possessed—of knowledge and power.”

They then detached this term from the construct phrase and made it definite, saying:

[the Essence].

This is a later coinage, not an expression used by the pure Arabs. A group of scholars therefore rejected it, including Abū al-Fath ibn Burhān, Ibn al-Dahhān, and others, saying, “This word is not Arabic.” Others, including al-Qādī, Ibn Aqīl, and others, responded to them.

The decisive conclusion is that it does not belong to pure, original Arabic but is a later coinage, like the terms “existent,” “quiddity,” “quality,” and the like. This expression presupposes attributes to which “essence” is annexed in a construct phrase. Thus, one says: “an essence possessed of knowledge,” “an essence possessed of power,” and “an essence possessed of speech.” And such is the reality, for nothing can subsist in itself in external reality without being characterized by any affirmative attribute whatsoever. To posit such a thing in external reality is like positing an accident that subsists by itself rather than in something else.

Thus, positing an accident that subsists by itself and has no attribute is like positing an attribute that does not subsist in anything else. Both are impossible. Whatever subsists in itself must have an attribute, and whatever is an attribute must have something subsisting in itself that is characterized by it.

For this reason, the opponents concede that they know of nothing subsisting in itself without an attribute, whether they call it a substance, a body, or something else. They say, “The existence of a substance divested of all accidents is impossible.” Whoever supposes that there could be an existent subsisting in itself without any attribute has supposed something whose existence in external reality is unknown and whose possibility there is likewise unknown. How much more so when it is known to be impossible in external reality, outside the mind.

All the discourse of those who deny the attributes entails that the actual existence of such a thing is impossible. Rather, it can only be posited—