al-Arbaʿīn and similar works he puts forward several arguments to prove the impossibility of an infinite succession of events, yet in books such as al-Mabāḥith al-Mashriqiyyah he rejects those same arguments. For this reason Abū al-Ḥasan al-Āmidī exposed the weakness of almost all of these methods and then adopted a line of reasoning even weaker than the rest. Likewise, Abū al-Thanāʾ al-Ārmawī, in Lubāb al-Arbaʿīn, undermined nearly everything that had been said on the subject. The full discussion appears elsewhere; what matters here is that an infinite regress of efficient causes is, by the consensus of rational minds, impossible.

The objection under review runs as follows: “Granted that each individual cause is contingent, why may the totality of causes not be non-contingent?” This is the position of those who say that every single event is originated while the species as a whole is eternal and stretches back without beginning. The whole must either share the same ruling as its parts or differ from them. If it shares their ruling, then the very species of events is originated—exactly what many of the mutakallimūn maintain and what Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī and others rely upon. They illustrate it by saying: “If every individual Zanj is black, then the entire group is black.”