ten thousand passages. We say this not as an exaggeration, but as a statement of fact; the testimony of the senses, reason, and innate human nature is sufficient.
Thus, one of the scholars said: Some people argued for denying causes, thereby making people of reason laugh at their reasoning. They imagined that in doing so they were defending monotheism. They thus resembled the negationists who denied the Lord’s attributes, His qualities of perfection, His exaltedness above His creation, His rising over His Throne, His speaking in His Books, and His speaking to His angels and servants. They too imagined that they were thereby defending monotheism, but this only led them to accuse Allah and His messengers of falsehood, strip Him of every perfection, and describe Him with the attributes of that which neither exists nor can exist.
The same applies to those who, regarding Allah’s actions, deem Him utterly above having any act subsist in Him. They imagine that they thereby uphold the temporal origination of the universe and affirm that it was created after not existing, even though they have denied the very basis of action and creation altogether.
Among the gravest offenses against revealed laws, prophethood, and monotheism is to give people the impression that monotheism can be complete only by denying causes! If people of reason come to believe that the Lord’s oneness can be affirmed only by invalidating causes, they will think ill of monotheism and of the one who brought it. You will find no book that affirms causes more emphatically than the Quran.
How astonishing! Allah is the Creator of both cause and effect. He is the One who made this the cause of that, while causes and effects are subject to His will and power and submissive to His command. If He wills to nullify a thing’s causal efficacy, He does so, just as He prevented the fire from burning His close friend Abraham and the water from drowning Moses, to whom He spoke, and his people. If He wills, He places impediments before those causes that prevent them from producing their effects while their powers remain. And if He wills, He leaves them unhindered to produce the effects they entail. He—Glorified is He—does all three. How does any of this impugn monotheism, and how could it entail polytheism in any respect?
Yet when those of feeble intellect hear that fire does not burn, water does not drown, bread does not satisfy hunger, and a sword does not cut; that none of these things has any causal efficacy whatsoever, is a cause of its associated effect, or possesses any power; and that the Creator, acting by His free choice, simply wills each of these effects to occur when one thing comes into contact with another—they declare, “This is monotheism: affirming that the Lord alone creates and produces effects.” This speaker does not realize that such a claim presents monotheism in a poor light and arms the enemies of the messengers against what they brought, as you can plainly see in their books, where they use it to drive people away from faith.” End quote. (1)