and the claim that, if attributes and acts were affirmed of the Beginningless, He would be a subject in which accidents and motions inhere, which would entail their successive occurrence in Him. This, in turn, would entail His having a beginning.

It is well known that the philosophers—along with groups among the scholars of hadith, jurisprudence, Sufism, and theology—challenge this method. Al-Ash‘arī himself wrote a book demonstrating the Mu‘tazilah’s inability to substantiate this method, as will be explained later.

As for the philosophers’ method, it rests on the claim that the Necessary Existent cannot possess attributes, because that would entail composition. The Muslim scholars versed in rational inquiry have shown the invalidity of this method, as is well known.

Thus, those who deny the attributes have no agreed-upon premise on which to base their denial. Rather, they share in that denial just as the polytheists and the People of the Book share in rejecting the Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and as the adherents of innovation share in opposing hadith and the Sunnah: each group proceeds from grounds different from those of the others.

Since their premises are not agreed upon among them—not even among most of them—and indeed most of them reject the truth of all these premises, it follows that these are not innately known, self-evident premises. For self-evident truths are not denied by the majority of rational people acting without prior collusion. Nor is it enough for some of the premises to be known to be true; all of them must be known to be true. Unless they are known self-evidently, they must follow necessarily from self-evident premises. Yet they have nothing of the kind. Rather, the most