—rather, you refuse to allow a slave to be your equal. How, then, can you be content to make what I have created and own a partner to Me, invoked and worshipped as I am invoked and worshipped? This is like what they used to say in their talbiyah: “Here I am at Your service. You have no partner except a partner who belongs to You: You own him and whatever he owns.” This is an exceedingly vast and important subject, but this is not the place to discuss it.

The purpose here is simply to point out that the Quran and Prophetic wisdom contain the main foundations of religion, both the doctrinal questions and the proofs that rightly deserve to be considered its foundations. The falsehoods that some people include under this designation are not foundations of religion, even if they place them under that heading. These include false doctrinal positions and invalid proofs: positions such as denying the divine attributes and divine decree, and proofs such as arguing that the world came into existence because the “accidents”—the attributes that subsist in bodies—came into existence, whether these are the akwān or other accidents.

This includes establishing the premises required by that argument: first, establishing the existence of “accidents,” which are attributes, or of “some of them,” such as the akwān—motion, rest, conjunction, and separation; second, “establishing that they came into existence” by refuting the claim that they become manifest after being latent, and refuting their transfer from one locus to another; third, establishing “the impossibility of a body being devoid” either of any class of accidents—by proving that a body is capable of possessing them and that whatever is capable of possessing something cannot lack both it and its opposite—or of the akwān; and fourth, establishing “the impossibility of events having no beginning.” This rests on two premises: