the second perspective:

This concerns speaking in these terms about Allah, Glorified and Exalted. If this method entails denying of the Lord Most High what they regard as marks of temporal origination, then His freedom from the marks and indications of temporal origination is self-evident and universally acknowledged, since the Maker of the world cannot Himself have come into being. The question, however, is what constitutes a mark of temporal origination, for much of this is disputed.

The proponents of this method inferred that the world came into being only from what they took as proof that bodies came into being. Their proof for the latter rested solely on the temporal origination of their attributes, which they call accidents. What is commonly acknowledged, however, is only the temporal origination of motions and their concomitants. As for the remaining accidents, whether they came into being is a matter of well-known dispute among them.

They may nevertheless say:

“Accidents can subsist only in a body, and every body has come into being. It follows that every attribute and everything possessing an attribute has come into being.”

From this they conclude that He must not be described in such terms, lest it follow that He came into being. Thus they discussed whether Allah is a body or not, whether He has attributes or not, whether He may be said to have accidents or not, and the related questions.

The Muʿtazilah and those among the other Jahmiyyah who agreed with them held that the Lord cannot be a body and cannot possess any attribute, since attributes are accidents. They went to extremes in negation, supposing that all of this affirmed His transcendence.

They said:

“The Creator cannot be a locus for accidents or temporal occurrences, nor can there be within