– Affirming the existence of accidents.
– Establishing that they are originated.
– Demonstrating the impossibility that substances be stripped of accidents.
– Demonstrating the impossibility of a succession of temporal events without a first beginning.

The Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—frequently critiques and analyzes these premises throughout this book ⦗1⦘.

The second passage ⦗2⦘:
In that section al-Juwaynī states that, whereas a substance can receive accidents and be qualified by temporal events, the rule for the Divine Essence is the opposite: the Lord is exalted far above the occurrence of such events.

The Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—has shown how al-Juwaynī’s words here fall short of accuracy ⦗3⦘.

As for the Hishāmiyyah, the Karrāmiyyah, and other sects who hold that every body is originated while also asserting that temporal events inhere in the Pre-Eternal, they say—agreeing with the Muʿtazilah on this principle—that whatever is never free of temporal events must itself be originated. They further contend that the eternal body is never devoid of such events, and that originated bodies likewise are never without them.

People disagree about stillness: is it a real, positive entity or merely an absence? Those who regard it as a positive entity maintain that when a body that is never without either motion or stillness lacks motion, positive stillness inheres in it. This is the argument of those who use the alternation of motion and stillness to prove that whatever possesses them must be originated.