without power is like affirming someone black without blackness, someone white without whiteness, someone standing without standing, one who prays without prayer, one who speaks without speech, and an agent without an act. This (1) is known to be untenable both linguistically and rationally.

They also said to them:

“You know that He is Living, All-Knowing, and All-Powerful. His being Living is not the same as His being All-Knowing, nor is His being All-Knowing the same as His being All-Powerful.

“These meanings that you apprehend and affirm (2) are the attributes, whether you call them judgments, states, meanings, or anything else. What matters is not the terms used, but the intelligible meanings.”

Anyone who carefully considers the words of the leading Mu'tazilites, Shi'ites, and philosophers who deny the attributes will find them utterly contradictory. The philosophers, for example, say:

“He is the intellecting subject (3), the intelligible object, and intellect itself; and He is the lover, the beloved, and love itself.”

Then they say:

“This meaning is identical to that meaning, and the knower is knowledge itself.”

They thus make one of the two attributes identical to the other, and make the one described identical to the attribute.

Moreover, these people themselves affirm—despite themselves—the very things for which they denounce Ahl al-Sunnah. Anyone who carefully considers the words of Abū al-Husayn al-Basrī (4) and others like him among the leading Mu'tazilites will find that the meanings he affirms (5) constitute the doctrine of those who affirm the attributes. This, however, is not the place to discuss that at length, for the discussion here is necessarily concise, given the present context, and we have already pointed out