“Read in the name of your Lord who created—created man from a clinging clot. Read, for your Lord is the Most Generous” (Sūrat al-‘Alaq 96:1-3).

Can any sound intellect ever accept that something could be created yet not be originated—except for those heretics who in matters of both reason and revelation have deviated, adopting sheer sophistry in rational discourse and the way of the Qarmaṭians with respect to transmitted texts?

The same meaning appears in His words:

“He created the heavens and the earth” (Sūrat al-Naḥl 16:3);

“and We built the heaven with Our might” (Sūrat adh-Dhāriyāt 51:47);

“By the sky and the One who built it” (Sūrat ash-Shams 91:5);

“Has He not constructed the heaven? He raised its vault and proportioned it” (Sūrat an-Nāziʿāt 79:27-28);

“He raised the heavens without pillars that you can see” (Sūrat ar-Raʿd 13:2);

“We made the sky a well-secured roof” (Sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ 21:32);

“He created the heavens and the earth and made the darkness and the light” (Sūrat al-Anʿām 6:1);

“He is the One who created the night and the day, the sun and the moon” (Sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ 21:33);

and scores of similar passages whose meaning is self-evident: that the construction of the heavens and the earth is an originated event that came to be after previously not existing. The verses do not mean that these bodies are eternal without beginning, nor that “creating” them merely signifies their being effects of some pre-eternal cause.

Among their slanders against the revealed texts is that they even interpret statements such as these in terms of mere “origination” of dependence, and not real coming-into-being.