For this reason, al-Ash'arī and the leading Companions affirmed that Allah, in His Essence, is above the world. This was also the position of Ibn Kullāb, al-Hārith al-Muhāsibī, Abū al-'Abbās al-Qalānisī, Abū Bakr al-Sibghī, Abū 'Alī al-Thaqafī, and others like them.
Yet remnants of Jahmī and Mu'tazilī thought remained with Ibn Kullāb and his followers, such as the argument from the temporal origination of accidents and the composite nature of bodies. Anyone who followed their path therefore found it necessary to carry those doctrines through consistently. He consequently found himself compelled to adopt the position of the Jahmiyyah and the Mu'tazilah in denying the attributes known through revealed reports, to give his reason precedence over the divine texts, and to oppose his predecessors and the Ash'arī Imams. The adherence to the Sunnah and the Prophet's guidance for which al-Ash'arī and the leading Companions had been praised thus became, in his view, the doctrines of the corporealist Hashwiyyah.
Similarly, when the Mu'tazilah defended Islam on many occasions and refuted the unbelievers with rational arguments, their religion was not founded on denying the Messenger's truthfulness or rejecting his reports and statements. Rather, they employed rational arguments that they had either devised themselves or received from non-Muslims who had used them. They then found it necessary to apply consistently the foundational principles on which their arguments rested, so that these would remain free of deficiencies and flaws. They consequently fell into various forms of rejecting the meanings of divine reports and denying the truth of prophetic hadiths.
The fundamental cause that led them to deny Allah's attributes, speech, and actions, to assert that the Quran was created, and to deny that Allah can be seen and that He is above His creation, was the argument from the temporal origination of accidents and the composite nature of bodies. This argument entailed the positions through which they opposed the Book, the Sunnah, and consensus in this matter, while also contradicting clear rational truths that do not admit