practised by human beings. In natural action, however, no such knowledge is required.

According to you, Allah brought the world into being as a necessary consequence of His essence, by nature and necessity, not through will and choice. Rather, all things necessarily follow from His essence, just as light necessarily follows from the sun. Just as the sun has no power to withhold its light, nor fire to withhold its heat, so the First has no power to refrain from His actions. Exalted is He far above what they say!”

He said:

“This mode of acting, even if figuratively called action, does not imply any knowledge whatsoever on the agent’s part.

If it is said: ‘There is a difference between the two cases: all things proceed from His essence because of His knowledge of all things. His apprehension of the universal order is thus the cause of the emanation of all things, which has no principle other than His knowledge of all things. His knowledge of all things is identical with His essence. Were He not to know all things, they would not come into existence from Him—unlike light from the sun.’

We reply: ‘On this point your fellow philosophers disagree with you. For they said that His essence is such that the existence of all things, in their proper order, necessarily follows from it by nature and necessity, not by virtue of His knowledge