what is meant is, ‘Protect yourselves from the Fire, even with the reward for half a date.’ They said, ‘Reward is an accident; how, then, can you say that?’ Yet speech, in your view, is an accident; how, then, can it come? Thus the argument turns back against you: you advanced it, and you are caught by the very evidence you invoked.”

He said: “Moreover, Allah is able to turn an accident into a body and a body into an accident. It is also possible that part of its reward is a person, like the youths of Paradise and its maidens, so that this youth comes in this form.”

I say: I subsequently found that this analogy I mentioned—likening