Is "except" in "There is no god except Allah" descriptive or exclusionary, and is the exclusion in it a discontinuous or continuous exception?

The ancient scholars produced numerous works on the grammatical analysis (i'rab) of the word of Tawhid, "Lā ilāha illā Allāh" (There is no god but Allah), including those by Ibn Hisham al-Ansari and al-Zarkashi.

"Lā" is a negator of the genus (nāfiyat al-jins) by agreement of the grammarians. "Ilāha" is its noun (ism), built on fatḥa, and its predicate (khabar) is understood to be "ḥaqq" (true), meaning "Lā ilāha ḥaqq illā Allāh" (There is no true god but Allah).

"Illā" is an a dāt istithnā' (particle of exception). "Allāh" can be in the nominative (raf') or accusative (naṣb) case. The nominative is the more preponderant (rājih) view, supported by six interpretations, the most famous being that the predicate of "lā" is omitted, and "illā Allāh" is a substitute (badal) for it. As for the accusative case, it is supported by two interpretations, the most famous being that it functions as an exception.

The two recognized views among grammarians are the view of substitution (al-badaliyya) and the view of predication (al-khabariyya). When "Allāh" is considered the predicate, the exception is mufarragh (unspecified antecedent), and "illā" has no grammatical effect.

As for the view that "illā" means "ghayr" (other than), it is weak in terms of meaning, because it makes the construction denote only the negation of divinity from others than Allah, without affirming it for Allah, which is not consistent with the creed of Tawhid.