for they cannot endure; Allah’s necessary attributes are entirely different. Just as the very essences(1) of created substances admit annihilation, while every accident belonging to them may pass away, the Lord—glorified and exalted—whose existence is necessary in and of Himself, is impossible(2) for Him to cease to be.

From this it becomes clear that he has produced no evidence for the origination (ḥudūth) of substances either, just as he offered no evidence for the impossibility of contingent events inhering in the Lord. His proof rests on four premises: the reality of accidents, their being all newly-arisen, that the substance is never devoid of them, and that an infinite regress of events without a beginning is impossible(3). Yet of the accidents inseparable from substances he has demonstrated nothing but the modes—conjunction and separation—and he established their origination solely by proving that they admit non-existence. Therefore, whatever has not been shown to be susceptible to non-existence cannot be declared originated, nor has he proved that every body is in principle capable of disjunction(5). Moreover, the argument he cites—that whatever is known to perish cannot be eternal—contains issues that need discussion, but this is not the place for them.

The matter we are concerned with here is the question of contingent events inhering in Allah—a point that the Jahmiyyah among the Muʿtazilah, together with those Ashʿarīs and others who follow them, have made into a cardinal principle for rejecting what the Quran and Sunnah state on the issue, such as His words:

“Then He rose over the Throne” (7)

“Then He turned toward the heaven” (8)

and the like. They also deny that He—exalted is He—may act after previously not having acted, and they maintain that for an agent to perform an act while his state before the act