the Throne.” [al-A'rāf: 54]

“And His Throne was upon water.” [Hūd: 7]

He thus specified that His rising over the Throne occurred after the creation of the heavens and the earth, just as He specified that it was over the Throne. This specification of place and time is like that concerning His descent and other acts. Through this method, they ruled out His being over the Throne altogether, although many who follow this method accept temporally originated acts on His part and therefore do not preclude His rising over the Throne from occurring in time. Likewise, many who deny such acts affirm His rising over the Throne while denying that any act subsists in Him, as will become clear when the grounds for these different positions are discussed.

The aim here is only to draw attention to this method.

Those who deny the attributes—such as the Mu'tazilah and the like—and those who affirm the attributes but deny acts—such as the Kullābiyyah, the Ash'ariyyah, and those jurists among Ahmad’s followers and others who agree with them, including Judge Abū Ya'lā, Abū al-Wafā' ibn 'Aqīl, Abū al-Hasan ibn al-Zāghūnī, and others, as well as Judge Abū Bakr ibn al-Bāqillānī, Abū Ishāq al-Isfarāyīnī, Abū Bakr ibn Fūrak, and others—said:

A body has a temporal beginning. The evidence for its origination is that we observe these bodies undergoing changes in their states and attributes: a body is sometimes moving and sometimes at rest, sometimes living and sometimes dead. The same applies to all the other attributes that arise in it.

A body must therefore have passed either from one beginningless state to another, from one temporally originated state to another, from a beginningless state to a temporally originated state, or from a temporally originated state to a beginningless state. It is impossible for it to have passed from one beginningless state to another, for if that were so, it would have been impossible for it to leave that state, because every property