in which you see it, has always existed. Those among them who affirm the Maker, however, claim that it is made but did not come into existence after its Maker. This was the position of Aristotle and his followers. Those who affirm Allah’s oneness said: ‘Rather, it is made and brought into being: it once did not exist, then came into existence.’”

There is no doubt that outright denial of the Maker is the position of the Sumaniyyah, whom Jahm ibn Safwān debated, and other Dahriyyah, as well as various groups among earlier nations. As for the Greek Dahriyyah—the followers of Aristotle and his associates, and others like them—despite being Dahriyyah, they acknowledge that the world is the effect of a cause that necessarily exists in itself. Consequently, their doctrine gained currency among many groups, who became heretics and hypocrites in this regard. They claimed to possess esoteric knowledge to which they alone had access, and alleged that what the revealed laws made manifest was for the benefit of the masses, along with other claims that need not be discussed here.

The point here is that when those speculative theologians sought to establish the existence of the Maker and the creation of the world, they followed the method they had devised: inferring that entities possessing attributes came into being from the origination of their attributes, or of their attributes and actions. They called these entities bodies or substances, and called their attributes and actions accidents.

They based their argument on two premises. The first is that entities possessing attributes are never devoid of originated accidents: attributes and actions that occur in them successively.