various issues and raise all manner of questions and specious objections, which he answers, yet most people neither know of this nor report it.

Al-Shāfiʿī, Ahmad, and other leading scholars debated various Jahmī speculative theologians, and much of what passed between them went unreported. Yet someone familiar with the methods of those who debated them and the issues they debated will know what they would have said. This is like a jurist who knows that two jurists debated a legal issue, such as executing a Muslim for killing a non-Muslim under Muslim protection, or killing with a heavy object, and similar matters. Someone who did not understand their arguments then reports the debate, and an accomplished jurist can infer from what was reported what was left unreported.

As for discussing the question of the soul—whether it subsists in its own right or is an accident—the statements of the Companions, the Successors, and other leading scholars affirming that the soul is an entity in its own right, which leaves the body, rises and ascends, experiences bliss and torment, speaks, is questioned and answers, and so forth, are too numerous to set down here.

How, then, can it be said that the Companions died without knowing whether the soul is a self-subsisting entity or an attribute, even though they did not use the terms “body” and “accident” in their discussions?

Likewise, the assertion that the Companions did not know whether the attributes are additional to