or comes in canopies of clouds, or was in a cloud—that is, a thin cloud—before He created the Throne. Yet they do not say that this is necessary for Him. Rather, it is among the things possible for Him, so He is not dependent on it.

The twenty-first point: If someone says that there must be an existent spatial location other than His essence, such as a cloud or something else, or the void, according to those who imagine it to exist, he may say: We do not concede that what he has mentioned concerning its measurement and dimensions establishes its contingency. These are precisely the arguments used to establish the contingency of things possessing magnitude. Their invalidity has already been explained, as has his failure to establish this claim through the arguments he cited to show that everything occupying space and every body is contingent.

The twenty-second point: If it is supposed that this is contingent in itself, it can only be dependent on Allah, since everything other than Him depends on Him. At most, the reality of the Lord would entail it, and His dependence on it would be like what is spoken of as the dependence of a thing possessing an attribute on that attribute. The most that can be said is that He depends on it as a cause depends on its effect, which itself depends on that cause—meaning that the cause is not