the doctrine of these people and adopted a different method.

I say: This statement resembles what Abū al-Hasan al-Ashʿarī mentioned in his Epistle to the Frontier. Its substance is that this method is a newly introduced innovation, that it can be dispensed with, and that pursuing it is therefore forbidden. Yet it does not establish that the method is invalid. Because people such as these do not inwardly believe it to be invalid, even though they forbid pursuing it, they have made statements based on some of its premises, even if contrary to the revealed texts and reason. The position of the most discerning imams and scholars, however, is that this method is invalid, as various groups of speculative theologians and philosophers also maintain.

Although Ibn Rushd al-Hafīd has demonstrated its invalidity, his own underlying method is even more invalid, despite his calling it the method of demonstration. Thus, when he had finished refuting the Ashʿarīs concerning this method and mentioned a second method belonging to Abū al-Maʿālī—namely, that the world is contingent and that whatever is contingent must have