glorified and exalted is He, and He precedes the world with a precedence that is one of His own attributes. If He is described as temporal, and what is meant here by time is one of His attributes, there is nothing impossible in that. The dispute is not over mere wording: we have an immediate, self-evident understanding of one thing existing before another without anything else existing besides the two. This precedence is intelligible, whether or not they call it temporal.

Third, grant that time is a concomitant of motion. This, however, is the question of temporal events occurring in Him. Al-Rāzī has stated that no rational evidence establishes its impossibility, and that accepting it is a necessary consequence of the positions of all schools. Thus, those who allow it may allow that this time is a concomitant of His own movement, glorified and exalted is He.

Fourth, it may be said that there is no need to make the Creator’s precedence over the world depend on an existent time, so this objection does not arise against us. As for time itself being temporal, this objection applies to them just as it applies to their opponents; it is not peculiar to the position that the world has a beginning. Rather, it is an argument against them, establishing precedence and succession without an existent time. Furthermore, it may be said that the regress is cut off if the second time is nonexistent, or if it is a concomitant of the existence of the Real, as explained earlier.