Principle Thirty-Two: A command to do something entails a prohibition of its opposite.
Whenever Allah commands a matter, He is simultaneously forbidding its contrary; whenever He forbids a matter, He is at the same time commanding its contrary. Likewise, when He praises Himself—or His devoted allies and elect servants—by denying any imperfection, that very denial affirms the corresponding perfection.
The reason is that an order cannot be perfectly fulfilled unless its opposite is abandoned. Thus, when He commands monotheism (tawḥīd), prayer, zakah, fasting, pilgrimage, dutifulness to parents, maintaining kinship ties, justice, and benevolence, He is thereby forbidding polytheism, the neglect of prayer, withholding zakah, abandoning the fast, neglecting the pilgrimage, undutifulness to parents, severing family ties, wrongdoing, and ill-treatment. Conversely, when He forbids polytheism, the abandonment of prayer, and so on, He is implicitly commanding monotheism, performance of the prayer, and the rest of those acts.
In the same way, when He commands patience and gratitude, and that the heart turn to Allah in repentance, love, fear, and hope, He is prohibiting panic, displeasure, ingratitude for blessings, and the heart’s turning away from Allah by attaching those sentiments to anyone else. And when He forbids panic, ingratitude, and heedlessness of the heart, He is in fact commanding patience and the other aforementioned virtues.
This is merely one illustration; in truth, every divine command and prohibition follows this pattern. Similarly, praise can only be offered by affirming perfections. Whenever He praises Himself and declares His transcendence above deficiencies and flaws—such as sleep, drowsiness, fatigue, death, anything in the universe being hidden from Him, wrongdoing, futility, play, creating in vain, or giving and requiting arbitrarily without wisdom—that praise necessarily entails affirming the perfection of His life, His self-subsistence, His power, the vastness of His knowledge, and the perfection of His justice and wisdom. Pure non-existence contains no perfection; a negation only conveys perfection when it serves to complete and exalt that perfection.