at all. Rather, none is beginningless except Him, glorified is He. He alone is the Creator of everything besides Him, and everything besides Him is created, as Allah Most High says:

“Allah is the Creator of all things.”

When these men debated the Jahmī and Muʿtazilī theologians, and those who agreed with their foundational argument that bodies—or the world—must have originated because a beginningless succession of events is impossible, they recognized that this proposition was false.

For this reason, leading speculative theologians, such as al-Rāzī and others, agree with them that it is unsound. Although al-Rāzī argues in his theological works, such as al-Arbaʿīn, Nihāyat al-ʿUqūl, and others, that a beginningless succession of events is impossible—as his argument and his fellow theologians’ objections to it have already been presented—he himself criticizes these proofs in other works. He argues that perpetual activity is necessary, that events cannot occur without a cause, and that they cannot occur outside time. He also answers every argument advanced in those theological works, as he does in al-Mabāhith al-Mashriqiyyah and elsewhere.

Perhaps those who criticized these proofs of his—such as al-Āmidī, al-Abharī, al-Urmawī, the author of Lubāb al-Arbaʿīn, and others—took these criticisms, or some of them, from his own writings, or drew them from the same sources as he did.

I have seen this for myself: I would come across these men’s objections to him, or some of his replies, then later consult another work of his and find that they had taken this