Shaykh al-Islām Ibn Taymiyyah said: “The point here is that the ‘tawhīd’ with which Allah revealed His Books and sent His messengers—which is mentioned in the Quran and Sunnah and is necessarily known to be part of Islam—is not these three matters mentioned by these speculative theologians, although they contain elements of the tawhīd brought by the Messenger. Despite their claim to be ‘monotheists,’ their tawhīd is not the tawhīd mentioned by Allah and His Messenger. Rather, the tawhīd they claim as their exclusive preserve is invalid according to revelation, reason, and linguistic usage. For the tawhīd of the messengers and the believers consists in worshipping Allah alone. Whoever worships Allah alone, associating nothing with Him, has affirmed His oneness. Whoever worships anything besides Him associates partners with Him and is not a monotheist sincerely devoting his religion to Him, even if he also professes these doctrines that they claim constitute tawhīd …”1.

We therefore say to this writer: Those whom you defend have divided tawhīd into three categories without any basis in revelation, while their classification contains false notions, some of which have already been pointed out. Will you count their classification as trinitarianism within tawhīd, just as you deemed the classification of tawhīd by Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah to be trinitarianism—even though Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah base their classification on revelation, whereas these people have no basis beyond personal inclination and reason? Does your denunciation extend to them too?

Or are your judgments driven purely by personal inclination, animosity, and injustice?

Sixth: We say to this writer that the objection of those who reject the division of tawhīd, including this writer himself, rests on the very same specious argument advanced by those who deny Allah’s names and attributes, such as the Jahmiyyah and others, who claim that affirming the names and attributes necessarily entails a plurality of eternal entities2,