is truly in motion, and His motion transcends the mind’s comprehension; it is therefore not displacement.

They said: Thales—one of the great masters of philosophy—said: “The intellects apprehend the Creator’s attributes only through His effects. As for His very being, no attribute of His is apprehended through His essence, but rather through our own essences.”

He used to say: “Allah brought the world into being not because He needed it, but out of His bounty. Were it not for the manifestation of the workings of goodness, nothing would exist here.”

He also used to say: “Above heaven are worlds brought into being by One whose innermost reality the intellects cannot apprehend.”

Pythagoras expressed a view similar to that of Thales: “He cannot be apprehended in Himself. He transcends the lofty spiritual attributes and is apprehended not through His substance, but through His effects in each world. Thus, He is described and characterized according to the extent to which those effects manifest themselves in that world. He is the One whom the intellects have sought to know, only to recognize that His essences are brought into being, preceded by something else, and created.”