and so forth. Its attributes fall into two categories: those exclusive to living beings, such as the attributes just mentioned, and those shared by living and nonliving things, such as color, size, taste, and smell.

If someone says, “Anything possessing a size could have a size different from its actual size,” this is equivalent to saying, “Anything possessing an attribute could have an attribute different from its actual attribute.” When we consider the existing things we know to possess sizes and attributes, allowing that their sizes could be otherwise is like allowing that their attributes could be otherwise. Indeed, size is itself an attribute.

Thus, when jurists discussed the implication of a qualifying attribute—as in the Prophet’s statement, peace and blessings be upon him, “Zakat is due on grazing camels”—some also discussed the implication of a specified quantity, as in his statement, “If water reaches two qullahs, it does not become impure.” Others replied that quantity is itself an attribute.

Accordingly, one argument advanced by some speculative theologians against the philosophers concerning the temporal origination of the world was that the world possesses attributes and sizes that could be otherwise, and therefore requires a particularizer. For the world is contingent by common agreement, and the particularizer cannot be a cause that necessarily produces its effect by virtue of its essence.

Abū al-Maʿālī followed this approach in al-Nizāmiyyah. Those who adopted this approach and their opponents did not distinguish between size and other attributes as to whether or not they could admit variation. A particular size is more closely connected to a particular entity than attributes