Ibn Rushd has also reported this view from the leading philosophers.

Abū al-Barakāt and other philosophers maintain that temporal occurrences subsist in Him, such as successive acts of willing and knowing. They have attributed this view, and views that go even further, to the early philosophers. I have cited their statements elsewhere, and some have already been presented above.

The point here is that every argument advanced by those who deny the divine attributes has been challenged by some of those same deniers in a manner that demonstrates its invalidity, just as several scholars have demonstrated the unsoundness of the philosophers’ methods.

[Al-Ghazālī’s discussion in Tahāfut al-falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers) of their inability to prove that the First is not a body]

Abū Hāmid said:

“An inquiry demonstrating their inability to establish proof that the First is not a body.

We say: This argument holds only for someone who considers a body to have come into existence, on the grounds that it is never devoid of temporal occurrences, and everything that comes into existence requires one who brings it into existence. But since you conceive of an eternal body whose existence has no beginning, even though it is never devoid of temporal occurrences, why should it be impossible for the First to be a body—whether the sun, the outermost celestial sphere, or something else?

If it is said: ‘Because a body must be composite, divisible quantitatively into two parts, conceptually into matter and form, and into attributes necessarily peculiar to it, whereby it is distinguished from all other