If it is said:

The impossibility of a beginningless succession of events is indicated by His words, Most High:

“And everything with Him is by due measure.” [al-Raʿd: 8]

And His words:

“He has enumerated all things in number.” [al-Jinn: 28]

A group of speculative thinkers have argued this, for what has no beginning has no totality, yet He has stated that He has enumerated all things in number.

The reply is:

Even if this were true, it would be an obscure indication, unsuitable to be relied upon in a matter such as denying what the texts indicate concerning the attributes. Those texts are numerous and clear, whereas this—even supposing it were a valid proof—would require many obscure premises, even if those premises were true.

One might argue, for example: This entails the impossibility of a beginningless succession of events, which in turn entails that a body must have come into being. For if a body were eternal and beginningless, a beginningless succession of events would necessarily follow: a body necessarily involves events and cannot be devoid of them, since it necessarily involves spatial states, motions, or accidents.

Then one would go on to say: Affirming the attributes entails that the one possessing them is a body.

Most of those who advance this premise have contradicted themselves concerning it, as we shall explain, if Allah Most High wills. How, then, can this argument stand when His words,

“He has enumerated all things in number,”

do not indicate that conclusion at all? For He, glorified be He, decreed the destinies of His creatures fifty thousand years before creating the heavens and the earth. He also said:

“And all things We have enumerated in a clear register.” [Yā Sīn: 12]

Thus, before things come into being, He has enumerated and recorded what will occur up to a specified term. He has therefore enumerated the future, which does not yet exist, just as He has enumerated the past, which existed and then ceased to exist.