—peace and blessings be upon him—except for one of the three, and it is soundly reported that he said:

“There is nothing before You.”

The other two phrases were transmitted according to their meaning. In any case, we have already shown that the Prophet—may God bless him and grant him peace—meant to answer the people of Yemen when they asked about the beginning of the creation of this world: the world that was brought forth in six days, while the Throne of God was upon the water before that, and God had ordained the measures of this world fifty thousand years before creating it.

The point at issue here is this: when it is said, “No contingent thing comes to be unless another contingent thing comes to be,” the statement may be taken in two ways. First, that no event can occur unless an event took place before it; on this there is well-known disagreement. Second, that no event can occur unless another event occurs along with it, because a contingent event cannot arise without a new cause—an agent does not act after previously not acting except on account of a newly-arisen cause. This would require that nothing contingent could ever proceed from the Eternal, for if an event were to occur without a fresh cause, the universal principle would be overturned, implying that He would never act at all; and were He to act, it would entail preferring one of two identical possibilities without any determining factor.

This argument has baffled many theologians and speculative thinkers. Many of them ended up saying, “The Omnipotent simply prefers one side of what He is able to do without a determinant,” while others claimed, “The very eternal will is what selects one of the two equivalent alternatives over the other.”