or eternal in its individual reality and consisting of a meaning, or eternal in its individual reality and consisting of letters, or of letters and sounds conjoined with one another from eternity and forever? These are the well-known positions on this subject.

Jahm and Abū al-Hudhayl al-‘Allāf ruled this out in both the past and the future. Jahm was more extreme in his negation, holding that Paradise and Hell would cease to exist, whereas Abū al-Hudhayl held that movements in Paradise would cease. They thus held that the Lord, exalted is He, would forever be unable to speak or act, just as they said:

“He had always been unable to speak or act; then speech and action became possible without anything occurring to make them possible.”

Most of their followers, however, distinguished between the past and the future, as discussed elsewhere. The point here is that when some treated infinite regress as a single kind, just as some treated circular dependence as a single kind, confusion arose. Some later thinkers, such as al-Āmidī and al-Ābharī, consequently began raising objections concerning an infinite regress of causal agents, claiming that there was no answer to them. It therefore became necessary to discuss this matter at length.

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The approach these later thinkers adopted to refute circular dependence and infinite regress in causes and their effects, as distinct from acts, is also sound, although some of them