And everyone who opposed them before Ibn Kullāb held that attributes, utterances, and acts connected with His will and power subsist in Him. Ibn Kullāb and his followers, however, distinguished between the particular attributes inseparable from His essence, such as life and knowledge, and those connected with His will and power. They said that the latter do not subsist in His essence, because this would entail a succession of newly occurring things in Him, as will be discussed below.

Ibn Karrām came later, after the ordeal of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, and died around 260 AH, some time after Ibn Kullāb. Most of those who pray toward the qiblah opposed the Muʿtazilah and the Kullābiyyah. This included even groups of speculative theologians among the Shīʿah and the Murjiʾah, such as the Hishāmiyyah and the followers of Abū Muʿādh al-Tūmanī, Zuhayr al-Atharī, and others, as al-Ashʿarī reported in his Maqālāt (Doctrinal Positions).

These and others like them held that newly occurring things subsist in Him. Some groups among them even explicitly affirmed motion in Him, as did some groups among the imams of hadith and the Sunnah. They explicitly stated that He has always spoken whenever He wills, that motion is inseparable from life, and other such things. Indeed, they maintain that those speculative theologians who introduced innovations contrary to the scriptural texts and to reason did so only on the basis of this principle. Examples include the claim that speech is a single eternal meaning, the claim that what is nonexistent is seen and heard, and the claim that a particular sound is eternal.

As for those outside the religious communities, the philosophers disagree over this principle. Many of their leading ancient figures are reported to have affirmed it, as was shown earlier when their positions were cited. Some of them even explicitly affirmed motion. Indeed, those who