precedes something else. Indeed, He precedes everything, for He is the First, and there is nothing like Him.

As for hadīth (“new”), in Arabic it can only mean something that came into being after not existing. In linguistic usage, it is the opposite of qadīm (“old”). Hence it denotes something newly arisen and recent, as when one speaks of old dates and new dates. These people, however, called the world “originated” on account of the Creator’s precedence over it, even though this does not accord strictly with Arabic usage. For this reason, the expression “the origination of the world” does not occur in the statements of the early generations of the Muslim community and its leading scholars: this expression entails coming into being anew, which is incompatible with relative precedence. Rather, they say, as Allah has said, that it is created, and use similar descriptions conveyed by the messengers—even though it may be described as old in a relative sense, as in “the old date stalk.”

Once this is understood, the statement, “An existent thing must be either qadīm or originated, since it cannot be neither,” should be understood according to these terminological conventions. Thus, whoever defines qadīm as that which was not preceded by nonexistence, and everything else as originated, says: “An existent thing either exists after