First: if you take this to be what is meant by “effect,” nothing in your proof actually rules it out. You yourself said: “The quiddity, or any of its attributes, cannot be the cause of existence, because a cause is ontologically prior to its effect. Were either—or both—of them the cause of necessary existence, one of two impossibilities would follow: either the thing would precede itself in existence, or it would exist twice.” For if a cause must precede its effect, and we suppose that necessary existence is an effect, then the existence of the quiddity would have to be prior to necessary existence. If the existence of the quiddity of the Necessary Being were something other than His necessary existence, He would then possess a separate, derivative existence. If the two were identical, His existence would have to precede His existence, so that He would be prior to Himself.

This is the gist of the questioner’s argument, and it correctly shows that necessary existence cannot have anything that produces it, acts upon it, brings it about, or serves as an efficient cause for it—whatever name one may give to such a notion. Yet the argument does not deny that necessary existence has concomitants (lawāzim) without which it is not realized, conditions (shurūṭ) without which necessary existence is not actual. Concomitants and conditions are not required to precede the thing conditioned in existence; they may simply accompany it, whether we know them to be conditions by reason or by revelation—such as life being a prerequisite for knowledge and power, knowledge a prerequisite for will, the essence a prerequisite for the attributes, or legal responsibility requiring that the agent possess both knowledge and ability, and so forth.

When the servant is ordered to secure the conditions before the act—just as he must purify himself before the prayer or face the qiblah—the true condition, in reality, is that which accompanies the prayer itself. What is done beforehand is performed only because it cannot be done simultaneously, and thus falls under the juristic principle: “Whatever an obligation cannot be fulfilled without is itself obligatory.” As for what the grammarians call a “condition” and a “response,”