that is simply a different convention, for in grammar the “condition” entails its consequent: whenever the condition is realized, the consequent must be realized as well. What the grammarians call a condition is, in fact, a necessary cause and therefore lies outside the present discussion. Accordingly, if the quiddity is understood to be an inseparable condition, it need not precede existence ontologically; and if it does not precede it—and its existence is identical to His existence—it does not follow that a thing would have to exist before itself.

Look, by way of comparison, at how the Peripatetic philosophers who follow Aristotle—such as Ibn Sīnā and those of his persuasion—treat a contingent quiddity: in their view it is never separated from its concrete existence, nor is that existence ever separated from it. They do not maintain that the quiddity is the cause of its existence or that it is prior to it; rather, the two are concomitant, just as they say of matter and form. When they speak of the necessary quiddity in the same manner they speak of the contingent one—as do those who agree with them on this point, for example Abū ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Khaṭīb and the like—the view of Ibn al-Khaṭīb and his peers is actually better than the philosophers’ own, and rightly so, for it is closer to Islam and the Sunnah.

In sum, the argument they present negates only two possibilities: that obligation precedes existence, or that existence is duplicated. Either eventuality would arise only if one claimed that His existence has an already-existent cause. Once no cause prior to His existence is posited, the difficulty evaporates—praise be to Allah.

Conditions and concomitants do not have to precede the conditioned thing, as we see with the quiddity and existence of contingent beings, with matter and form, and with inseparable attributes together with their subject—such as animality and humanity, or even the capacity for laughter in relation to man. The existence of each is conditional upon, and inseparable from, the other, and there is no need for one to be prior to the other in being. The situation would be different only if one were made the efficient cause of the other, for that would indeed be impossible.