Part of Concepts of Ahl as-Sunnah (series completed)
· Lesson 68 of 1251
Summary of Sunni concepts | Concept (66) | Negation of purity and the doctrine of syllabus
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Transcript
Machine translation — may contain errors
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A summary of the concepts held by the Ahl al-Sunnah.
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The negation of attributes and the doctrine of privations.
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When the Mu'attilah (deniers of attributes) negated the attributes of Allah, the Almighty and Majestic,
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and found themselves in need of defining and clarifying their object of worship,
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they resorted to describing Him, Glorified is He, through negation.
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They say:
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"He is neither inside the world nor outside of it,"
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"neither a substance nor an accident,"
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"neither existent nor non-existent,"
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"neither capable nor incapable,"
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and so on.
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Thus, they stripped their object of worship of every attribute and its opposite.
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They did this, according to their claims, to flee from anthropomorphism and multiplicity.
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It is for this reason that their creed is described as the doctrine of privations,
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because it strips every description and its opposite from Allah, the Almighty and Majestic.
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By Allah, this is a sign of their misguidance and the foolishness of their intellects.
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It is refuted from two perspectives.
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First, reason forbids the negation of two contradictories at the same time.
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For two contradictories cannot coexist,
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nor can they both be absent at the same time, ever.
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Rather, one must necessarily exist while the other is absent.
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Examples include existence and non-existence, or night and day.
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This is unlike two contraries, which cannot coexist,
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but may both be absent.
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For instance, whiteness and blackness.
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A thing cannot be white and black at the same time;
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rather, it is either one of them exclusively,
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or it is neither white nor black,
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but rather another color, such as red.
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Second, pure negation is absolute non-existence.
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This is a form of disparagement and desecration, not perfection and glorification.
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You have likened your object of worship to that which is non-existent and has no reality.
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This is sufficient as a manifest error and misguidance.