However, they disagree about the act of creation that is distinct from the created thing: is it eternal and inhering in His essence? Or does it exist apart from Him? Or is it newly arising and inhering in His essence? If it is newly arising, is its very kind newly arising? Or are the newly arising things its individual instances, while their kind is eternal, so that Allah’s attributes of perfection are eternal and He has always been, and will always remain, possessed of attributes of perfection?

Each of these four views has been held by a group. They also say that the inherence of these matters in His essence is among the attributes of perfection. For we know that Allah speaks, and that one who speaks can only do so through speech inhering in his own essence. We also know that He wills, and that one who wills can only do so through a will inhering in his own essence. Speech and will inhering in someone else cannot be His speech or His will, because when an attribute inheres in a subject, it characterizes that subject, not another.

They also say that Allah has declared:

“His command, when He wills a thing, is only to say to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.”

The particle an indicates that the action is future; thus, on the evidence of revelation, both the utterance and the will must be newly arising.

In short, most of what is advanced in this discussion comes down to some inconsistency on the part of the Karrāmiyyah. This is the mainstay of their opponents’ argument: they have nothing to rely upon except the Karrāmiyyah’s inconsistency. Yet the inconsistency of one disputing party does not establish the correctness of the other’s position, since the truth may lie in a third position—neither that of one party nor that of the other. This is especially so when a third position is known to exist, and that position dispels the objections that undermine each of the two weak positions.