that has become obscured: part of it accords with the position of the adherents of revealed religions, while another part accords with that of the eternalist philosophers. For it rests on affirming intellects and souls, maintaining that they are not bodies and that they are eternal, without beginning, and necessarily accompany the essence of Allah Most High.

These positions are not those of the adherents of revealed religions; rather, they are false positions, as has been explained at length elsewhere. It has also been shown that the immaterial entities they posit have their existence established only in minds, in external reality.

Al-Urmawī gave this answer only because these later thinkers—such as al-Shahrastānī, al-Rāzī and al-Āmidī—claimed that the dialectical theologians had no proof disproving the immaterial intellects and souls posited by these philosophizers, and that their proof that bodies came into existence did not establish that these immaterial entities came into existence.

This claim is false. Rather, the leading dialectical theologians explicitly stated that the nonexistence of these immaterial entities, and the falsity of the claim that a contingent being exists which is neither a body nor something inhering in a body, are self-evident to reason. This was stated by the master Abū al-Ma‘ālī and others. Indeed, groups of speculative thinkers maintained that everything that exists falls within these two categories, and that this is self-evident to reason. This has been discussed at length elsewhere.

The point here is that the answer given by al-Urmawī rests on this principle. It entails that the Lord Most High is, by His very essence, the necessitating cause of the eternal intellects and souls that necessarily accompany His essence, not an agent who produces them through His will and power. They interpret the intellects as angels, which would make the angels eternal