for each of them has an agent that has no need of it: He is its Lord and Owner, while it is His creature—nurtured and possessed by Him. Allah alone is the Self-Sufficient; everything besides Him stands in need of Him.

Now, if one were to imagine that this agent or cause were simultaneously its own effect—so that each of the two would be both cause and effect of the other—this too is impossible. A cause or agent must exist prior to the caused effect; thus “this” would have to precede “that” while “that” at the same time preceded “this.” The consequence would be that a thing is before what precedes it and after what follows it, obliging it to be both existent and nonexistent four separate times!

A thing, therefore, cannot possibly be its own efficient cause, nor act upon itself, for that would require it to precede itself—an absurdity that would make it simultaneously existent and nonexistent. On this basis it is invalid to claim that a being’s quiddity, essence, or very self—whatever phrase is adopted—could be the efficient cause of its own existence. This truth is beyond dispute.

Accordingly, it has been demonstrated that the necessity of His existence rules out His having any efficient cause, whether that supposed cause were itself His effect or not. We further maintain that His necessary existence in and of Himself also negates His dependence on anything that can do without Him. Were some aspect of His existence not among the intrinsic concomitants of His very being but contingent upon something independent of Him, His existence would then be by virtue of that self-sufficient thing, not by virtue of Himself.

By this criterion we distinguish His existence from an efficient cause and from external conditions that are independent of Him, as opposed to the necessary concomitants of a being whose existence is necessary in itself. As for those concomitants that inseparably accompany His existence—called by some “conditions,” “reasons,” or even “causes,” not in the sense of an originating agent but in the sense of a prerequisite—nothing in the notion of necessary existence conflicts with them. Indeed, should it be said that His attributes are themselves necessary in existence yet still require a locus and recipient, namely the One described, their reliance on that locus in no way bars their necessity. What would bar it is dependence on an originating agent, as explained earlier; but the subject described is not an agent that brings the attribute into being—it is merely the locus that receives it. By this clarification the sophistry behind their denial is dispelled