among the caliphs strengthened them and subjected people to an inquisition, calling them to adopt their doctrine. Allah upheld faith and the Sunnah through the leaders of guidance whom He raised up, making them leaders in religion through the patience and certainty He had granted them. As Allah Most High said:

“And We made from among them leaders guiding by Our command when they were patient and were certain of Our signs.”
[al-Sajdah: 24]

The point here is that the rational arguments contradicting the scriptural texts advanced by the Jahmiyyah, who deny the divine attributes, were unknown within the Muslim community at that time. When they introduced them, most of the community never heard them.

The Jahmiyyah—the Muʿtazilah and others—subsequently committed as much of this to books as Allah willed, while most believers remained unaware of it. Every denier may advance rational arguments supporting his negation that another does not mention. Nor will you find two groups agreeing upon a single rational method. Rather, the Muʿtazilah base their denial chiefly on the claim that attributes are accidents, and accidents can inhere only in a body. Their principal argument for denying that Allah is a body is that a body cannot be free of temporally occurring events, or that it is composed of indivisible parts. Thus, they infer its temporal origination from its four states: conjunction, separation, motion, and rest.

As for Ibn Kullāb and his followers, they dispute the claim that attributes can inhere only in something temporally originated, but concede to them that acts and similar matters dependent on volition do not