or to affirm a universal that bodies share—a common property which, as a universal, never exists except as a body or an accident—or to posit a “form” that is itself nothing but a body or an accident. Indeed, Ibn Ḥazm, although he held the philosophers in high esteem, maintained that the matter is confined to bodies and accidents, and he showed that no contingent being lies beyond these two.

Other leading scholars of kalām and rational inquiry went further, stating in broader terms that whatever exists does not escape these two categories. They demonstrated that anything others claim to establish outside them is either impossible to exist in the external world or is in fact subsumed under one of the two.

Admittedly, the terms “body” and “accident” are themselves subject to both terminological and substantive philosophical disagreement, as has been elaborated elsewhere. What concerns us here, however, is that the philosophers have no proof whatsoever for the past-eternity of any individual entity in the cosmos; the very rational principle on which they rely actually precludes such pre-eternity, as we have explained in several places.

Take Ibn Sīnā, the finest of their later representatives: he took the philosophy of the ancients, distilled it, and then added to it the rational investigations he had absorbed from the mutakallimūn—whether Muʿtazilites or others—augmenting the system with material that accorded with it and reinforced it. Thus the philosophers acquired, in matters of theology, a discourse of real substance not found among their predecessors. The best they now possess in the field of divine science is precisely what Ibn Sīnā drew from the theologians’ writings, while the points in which he diverges from their foundational principles—areas where the theologians themselves had stumbled—became his mainstay in arguing against them.