—for, they claim, such states can subsist only in a being that occupies space. Yet they also maintain that power, life, and the like can subsist in an eternal, non-spatial being, while the majority of rational people say that this is merely drawing an arbitrary distinction between two identical cases.

Likewise, they argue that whenever the accidents—which they identify with the attributes—subsist in a subject, that subject must be created; but then they say that the attributes subsist in the Lord and do not indicate that He is originated (1).

A similar inconsistency appears in their debate with the Muʿtazilites regarding the Qur’an. Their principal argument is: were the Qur’an created, God would necessarily create it either in Himself, in something other than Himself, or in neither. The third alternative is impossible, for it would imply an attribute existing by itself; the first is impossible because He is no locus for temporal occurrences; and the second is impossible because, were He to create it in a substrate, the ruling of that attribute would revert to that substrate, making it the one who actually speaks—for whenever an attribute inheres in something, its ruling belongs to that very thing and not to anything else, just as is the case with knowledge, power, and life.

This is one of the strongest arguments they advance in kalām. Yet they undermined it when they refused to allow acts to subsist in Him while still ascribing them to Him: thus He is called Creator and Just even though, according to them, no creating or justice subsists in Him. Then came another statement that people found objectionable: they excluded letters from the definition of speech and treated the application of the term “speech” to them as figurative. Abū al-Maʿālī and those who followed him, such as al-Rāzī, sought to escape this odious implication and therefore said: the term “speech” is applied homonymously both to the meaning that subsists in the soul and to the letters that indicate it. By saying this, however, they destroyed the very foundation of their proof against the Muʿtazilites, for if what subsists in something other than God can truly be His speech, their argument collapses