is the first clear reason why revelation has not explicitly stated that He is not a body.

He said:

“For this reason, Imam al-Mahdī set aside this proof, since it neither satisfied the intellectual elite nor convinced ordinary people. Instead, he followed a remarkable method accessible to both groups alike.

“This is one of his distinctive achievements in knowledge; no one is known to have followed this method before him. It consists in establishing the equivalence of bodies—that is, their equality in all their properties—particularly their shared finitude of power, by which I mean that every body has finite power, and their shared composite nature. It is in these two respects that bodies depend upon an agent.

“As for their dependence arising from composition, every composite thing is contingent, and every contingent thing depends upon an agent.

“As for their dependence upon an agent because their power is finite, anything whose power is finite—if the agent does not decree death for it—reaches the limit of its power and perishes; it cannot survive even for the blink of an eye.

“This is the meaning of the Most High’s words:

‘The Most Merciful rose over the Throne.’ [Tā Hā: 5]

“Whence, then, comes this supreme antidote for this intractable disease!”

I say:

One might reply: If this proposition is true, it is impossible that no one before Ibn Tūmart knew it, including those more knowledgeable about Allah and more virtuous than he.

If that earlier method is invalid, while this is the method and no one else has followed it, then no one before him knew it.

The same applies to anyone who follows a method of negation and claims that no one else has followed it: this entails that the matter was unknown before him. Thus, those who preceded him among the finest members of this community could not have been