eternal, without beginning, and necessary in His very existence, in no need of an eternal cause, an eternal necessitating principle, or an eternal agent. His pre-eternity and His necessity flow directly from His timeless essence. If, as the Imams of the early generations (the Salaf) maintained, He has never ceased to speak whenever He wills and has never ceased to perform acts that subsist in Him, the most that follows from this is the perpetual succession of events. Should such perpetual events be judged impossible, one would have to concede the origination of something that is never free of events, that events themselves have a first inception, and that the universe as a whole is originated. If, on the other hand, such perpetual succession is admitted, the origination of every single component of the universe likewise follows, for events can occur only successively—one after another—and cannot all exist simultaneously. From pre-eternity to everlastingness there is no instant in which all originated things could coexist. Rather, He brings each event into being at the very moment He creates it, and in doing so He is in no need of anything external to Himself; He is, in and of Himself, independent of everything besides Him.

Accordingly, His producing this specific event or that specific event—so as actually to be producing it—is not something eternal and inseparable from His essence in pre-eternity, nor was He in pre-eternity producing every event. Instead, in pre-eternity as in post-eternity, He is an agent: He has never ceased and will never cease to act, that is, to bring about one thing after another. There is no defined moment in pre-eternity during which He acted upon all things at once; rather, in every state He is eternal without beginning, exactly as He has always been.

Thus, in every condition He acts, just as He acted in the condition before it and will act in the condition after it. No single act has ever accompanied Him perpetually; a fortiori, none of the things acted upon has ever accompanied Him perpetually. Hence no act is eternal without beginning, and therefore no product is eternal without beginning. It is impossible that at any moment He should be effecting all events, or something that entails all events, or that He should at some point come to be an agent producing one event after another. Rather, He is perpetually and unceasingly the effective cause.