his attributes; nor did his parents or nature do so. His need for a maker who directs his affairs was thus established. He said: ‘Whatever holds true of one individual or one body holds true of all, since all share corporeality.’”

[Ibn Taymiyya’s commentary]

I say:

This is the approach mentioned earlier, which al-Ash'arī set out in his Epistle to the People of the Frontier. It rests on his establishing that man came into being through the variations in his forms and configurations. Hence his statement that he followed an approach to establishing that man came into being: he made man’s coming into being the conclusion to be established, and the changes in his forms the evidence for it.

He thus made the coming into being of a form evidence that the thing possessing that form came into being. This approach necessarily requires demonstrating the impossibility of a beginningless succession of originated events. It therefore belongs to the same category as the argument from accidents, but is narrower both in its evidence and in what it establishes. Configurations are more specific, and they establish only that a thing whose configuration came into being itself came into being.

The argument used by those others is more general. Al-Ash'arī, however, turned from an obscure approach to a clear one. This is the approach that al-Rāzī and others like him call arguing from the coming into being of attributes and accidents that subsist in bodies. For they say, concerning