As for those who say:

“He has always spoken whenever He wills, or acted according to His will, and will or successive utterances subsist in Him, one after another,”

they never regard Him as a complete cause or a fully necessitating cause from eternity. Nor do they say that His agency in producing any effect is complete from eternity.

Rather, in their view, to say that something is produced and fashioned yet beginningless is to combine two contradictory propositions. If a produced thing—the effect of the One who brings it into being—cannot be beginningless, then the causal activity and bringing into being that necessarily entail it cannot be eternal and beginningless either. It is therefore impossible for Him to be the complete cause of anything from eternity.

Rather, through the acts that subsist in Him, His essence necessarily entails one thing after another. Whenever His agency in producing an effect becomes complete, that effect comes into existence—that effect comes into existence. As Allah Most High says:

“When He wills a thing, His command is only to say to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.”

(Yā Sīn: 82)

Thus, whenever He brings a thing into being, He brings it into being, and the thing brought into being follows His bringing it into being. This is always the case. Everything other than Him is therefore created, coming into being after not having existed. His bringing it into being and creating it were not complete from eternity; rather, they became complete thereafter. Upon the completion of this bringing into being and creation, the thing brought into being and created came to exist after that bringing into being and creation, not simultaneously with them in time. How far removed, then, is this view from yours?!