visible in the sky, while they remain in view and move along their courses, that they are setting. Nor does any rational person describe everyone who walks, travels, journeys, or flies as setting.

[The fourth point]

None of the Quranic commentators among the scholars of the early generations, nor any scholar of language, advanced this interpretation. Rather, it is an interpretation newly introduced into Islam, as ‘Uthmān ibn Sa‘īd al-Dārimī and other scholars of the Sunnah mentioned, explaining that it is an innovated interpretation.

Because of this innovation, Ibn Sīnā and others like him took the word “setting” to mean contingency, as he said in his al-Ishārāt:

“Some people have said, ‘This perceptible thing exists by virtue of its own essence and is necessary in itself.’ But if you recall what was said concerning the condition for necessary existence, you will not find this perceptible thing to be necessarily existent, and you will recite the words of Allah Most High: ‘I do not love those that set’ [al-An‘ām: 76]. For falling into the confines of contingency is a kind of setting.”

These are his words.