the texts, to conclusions that ordinary people and scholars alike know to be fabrications against the Messenger and pure heresy, such as the Bātiniyyah’s interpretations of acts of worship, the Quran, and other matters.

Among the things that emboldened these philosophers in their heresy was the other group’s introduction into the revealed law of things that were not part of it, even though they did so on the basis of interpretations. The claims they made part of the religion of Islam—that the Creator was unable to speak and act, then became able to do so without any cause; that this entails a contingent possibility being realized without a determining factor; that what is contingent changed from being intrinsically impossible to being intrinsically possible without any newly arising cause; and that the agent became able to act and speak after this had been impossible for Him, without any cause—were seized upon by the philosophers, who challenged them and advanced their well-known argument for the eternity of the world:

Everything required for the Creator to produce an effect either existed from eternity or did not. If it existed, then He must always have been acting, because a fully sufficient cause cannot be without its effect. If it did not exist, then it could not come into existence thereafter, because the same argument applies to that newly arising thing as to anything else. Thus, without a fully sufficient determining factor, the act is impossible; when that factor is present, the act must occur.

When they advanced this argument, the former group began responding to it in ways that did not refute it, by