I say: In Arabic usage the word ʿaql (intellect) comprises both knowledge itself and acting in accordance with that knowledge. Some mutakallimūn restrict the term to one particular kind of knowledge, describing it as a category of self-evident knowledge. Others mean by it nothing but acting upon what one knows, as Abū al-Barakāt has stated.

At times the word is intended for the human faculty itself—the innate disposition by which a person both acquires such knowledge and puts it into practice. For that reason, in the speech of the early authorities, such as Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī, and others, the term ʿaql includes this inborn faculty.

Those, however, who deny innate dispositions, natural properties, and the forces embedded in things—and who claim, following Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī and his supporters like Qāḍī Abū Bakr [al-Bāqillānī], Qāḍī Abū Yaʿlā, Abū al-Maʿālī [al-Juwaynī], Abū al-Ḥasan ibn al-Zāghūnī, Abū Bakr ibn al-ʿArabī, and others—that the Omnipotent, freely willing Creator brings every event into being solely by His will, preferring one of two identical possibilities without any determining factor, allow the name ʿaql to refer only to a kind of self-evident knowledge. In their view there is no “nature” through which knowledge or volitions arise; created entities possess no causes that generate events, and no event prevails over another because of any property within it. Rather, they say that the Sovereign, volitional Agent acts in the presence of these things, not by means of them—merely as a matter of customary conjunction. What people ordinarily call “cause” and “effect” they describe as two occurrences the Creator has habitually linked, not as one containing a power that produces the other.

Accordingly, those among them who affirm analogical reasoning (qiyās) hold that the legal causes (ʿilal) are nothing but indicators; and if these causes sometimes coincide with a suitability or benefit—such as mercy—similar to what is observed in created phenomena, that, too, is nothing more than customary linkage.