and deal with the texts? Or should we turn our hearts away from understanding, reflecting upon, and comprehending them, and say: ‘We do not know what they mean’?”

If it is said:
“What you have mentioned is evident to anyone who reflects on the circumstances of Islam in its early days and how it emerged. Yet these specious rational arguments advanced by those who deny the divine attributes have led many people astray, both within this community and among the People of the Book. Were the minds of the unbelievers sounder than theirs? If that is so, how are we to understand cases in which people fall prey to these arguments?”

The answer is:
The point here is to demonstrate the falsehood of the claim that believing the Messenger is impossible without rational propositions that contradict the meaning of what he reported. This applies to those who make that claim among the Jahmiyyah, the Muʿtazilah, their Ashʿarī followers, and those who joined them from among the jurists belonging to the schools of the four imams and the Sufis. They maintain that believing the Messenger is impossible unless one establishes the occurrence of events in the world through the temporal origination of bodies; that this, in turn, is established through the temporal origination of what inheres in those bodies—either accidents generally or motions; and that this rests upon the impossibility of a beginningless succession of events. This entails denying the acts that subsist in Allah’s own being and are connected to His will and choice—indeed, denying His attributes—and maintaining that the Quran is created, that Allah will not be seen in the Hereafter, and that He is not above the world.

Whoever says that believing what the Messenger reported is possible only through this method makes a claim whose falsehood is necessarily known from the religion of Islam. Hence al-Ashʿarī and others said that these methods are innovations in the religion of the prophets—indeed, they are forbidden, not