Allah except Allah Himself. In their view, anyone who holds that someone other than Allah affirms Allah’s oneness is a denier, as he said:
The One has never been affirmed as one by anyone
(that is, by anyone other than Him) …
For whoever affirms His oneness is a denier.
For according to their doctrine, He is both the One whose oneness is affirmed and the one who affirms it. Hence he also said:
The affirmation of oneness by one who speaks from his own attribute
Is but a loan annulled by the One.
He means that when the servant utters an affirmation of divine oneness while regarding himself as the speaker, he is speaking only from his own attribute. He thus borrows what does not belong to him and speaks with it; this is a loan that the One has annulled. But when he is annihilated from witnessing himself and the Real speaks through his tongue—because that which had no true existence has vanished and He who has never ceased to exist remains—the Real becomes the one who speaks of His own attribute, not the servant’s attribute. He is then both the One whose oneness is affirmed and the one who affirms it.
Hence he said:
His affirmation of Himself is His affirmation of oneness—
that is, the Real’s affirmation of Himself. In other words, it is He Himself (1); the affirmation is His, not the creatures’ affirmation of Him. For in their view, no creature affirms His oneness, in the sense that He is the one who utters the affirmation of divine oneness through the tongue of His elect; the speaker is not the creature. This resembles what the Christians say concerning Christ: “The divine nature spoke through the tongue of the human nature.”
The essence of the matter is that, in their view, anyone who speaks of divine oneness or conceives of it while witnessing anything other than Allah is not one who affirms divine oneness (2). But if he becomes entirely absent from himself and all awareness of himself is annihilated, thereby attaining the station of affirming divine oneness through annihilation (3), which draws him (4) toward the affirmation of divine oneness attained by the masters of comprehensive unity, then the Real becomes the