whatsoever.

Al-Ārmūwī then set out the rejoinder he styled “the Dazzling Answer,” a reply he had actually lifted from Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, for al-Rāzī had presented the very same “dazzling” argument in his al-Maṭālib al-ʿĀliya. Al-Ārmūwī maintained that the eternity of the corporeal world does not follow, for one can posit an Intellect—or a Soul—existing from pre-eternity, from which successive concepts would proceed, each one emerging after the previous, until a particular concept is reached that serves as the condition for the effusion of the corporeal world from the Eternal Principle.

The Indian author, for his part, had nothing beyond what he had copied from these writers. Building on this very answer, Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Qushayrī, better known as Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd, asserted that only bodies are temporally originated, while holding that all contingent beings nonetheless issue from the Necessary.

Their answer rests on a flawed assumption—namely, that the proof establishes the origination of bodies but not of anything else, on the grounds that the theologians never produced a demonstration that nothing contingent exists except bodies and accidents. This very point had already been noted by al-Shahrastānī, al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, and other later Muʿtazilī and Ashʿarī theologians whose kalām had become entangled with philosophy.