Abū al-Hudhayl to affirm that the movements of the inhabitants of Paradise will cease. For the sake of this argument, others, such as al-Ash'arī, committed themselves to the view that water, air, earth, and fire possess taste, color, smell, and similar attributes. For its sake, and for other reasons as well, some maintained that no accidents—such as taste, color, and others—can persist under any circumstances. They needed to answer the objection of inconsistency raised against them when they affirmed attributes for Allah while arguing that bodies are temporally originated on the basis of their attributes. Thus, they said:

“The attributes of bodies are accidents: that is, they arise and then disappear, and therefore cannot persist under any circumstances, unlike Allah’s attributes, which endure.”

Some of them relied on the argument that if an accident persisted, it could not cease to exist, since its cessation would have to occur through the origination of an opposite, the loss of a necessary condition, or the agent’s choice, and all these possibilities are impossible. Other members of their own ranks do not adopt this argument. Rather, they allow that an agent acting by choice can bring an existing thing to an end just as he brings a nonexistent thing into existence. They do not maintain that bodies can cease to exist only by having their accidents cut off, as the former group asserted; nor do they hold that this occurs through the creation of an opposite—namely, annihilation inhering in no substrate—as some of the Mu'tazilah maintained.