The Muʿtazilah and those who followed them from among the Kullābiyyah and their adherents took this position only because they hold that whatever is the locus of accidents must itself be originated. For the Muʿtazilah, this follows from their basic principle that attributes are contingent accidents that can subsist only in something newly brought into being. As for the Kullābiyyah and their followers, one of their principles is that whatever can admit accidents has never been free of them, and whatever is never free of accidents is itself contingent, since they deem an infinite regress of accidents without a first to be impossible.

Those who contested them on this issue span the scholars of ḥadīth, kalām, philosophy, and others—such as the majority of the ḥadīth scholars, many of the Murjiʾah, the Shiʿah, the jurists, and the like: the Hāshimiyyah, Abū Muʿādh al-Tūmanī, Dāwūd b. ʿAlī and the Karrāmiyyah, as well as many of the leading philosophers, both early and late. These opponents dispute one or both of the two premises. They reject the claim that whatever is capable of accidents has never been without them, a point also contested by the Hāshimiyyah, the Karrāmiyyah, Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Khaṭīb, Abū al-Ḥasan al-Āmidī, and others, who have all criticized the assertion that anything able to admit accidents is necessarily forever accompanied by them.

As for their second claim—that the occurrence of accidents without a first beginning is impossible—this has been disputed by the foremost scholars of the revealed religions, by the leading philosophers, and by the leading authorities of ḥadīth and Sunnah; indeed, the majority of them rejected it, and the eminent philosophers likewise opposed it.