, for they said that knowledge and power extend to everything known and everything subject to power: He knows all things and has power over all things. Will and speech, however, do not extend to everything willed and everything said. Rather, He speaks only the truth, commands only what is good, and wills only what comes into existence; His will of love extends only to what He has commanded.

This was among their arguments that His having will and speech is temporally originated, unlike His having knowledge and power. They said that particularization pertains to temporally originated things, whereas universality belongs to what is eternal.

[Section]

What further clarifies this matter—and shows that they themselves challenge the proofs they invoke to deny the implications of Allah’s being above His creation, demonstrating their invalidity elsewhere—is that most of these arguments invoked by al-Āmidī and others to deny that He is a body were themselves invalidated by those same authors elsewhere.

[Continuation of al-Āmidī’s discussion denying corporeality of Allah Most High]

The purpose here is to recount what al-Āmidī said. When he discussed the approaches used to establish the temporal origination of bodies, he rejected most of them ن and chose the method based on the following premises: a body cannot be devoid of accidents; an accident cannot persist for two successive moments, so accidents are temporally originated; the coming into being of infinitely many events is impossible; and whatever cannot be devoid of originated events that have a beginning must itself have a beginning. He stated that this method is the approach