its premises. Rather, each group challenges the other’s argument. The philosophers challenge the Muʿtazilah’s argument for denying the attributes—indeed, for denying corporeality, spatial confinement, and the like. For the Muʿtazilah’s argument rests on the premise that what is eternal cannot be a locus for attributes and motions, and therefore cannot be a body or be spatially confined. Attributes, they maintain, are accidents. They argue that bodies originate in time because their accidents and motions originate in time, no body is ever devoid of them, and whatever is never devoid of temporally originated events must itself originate in time.

Indeed, al-Ashʿarī himself stated in his Epistle to the People of the Frontier that this argument, which they used to establish the temporal origination of the world—namely, inferring the temporal origination of bodies from that of their accidents—is an argument forbidden in the revealed laws of the prophets, which none of the messengers or their followers ever employed. In another work, he explained the Muʿtazilah’s inability to establish a proof that He is not a body.

Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī and other leading scholars of rational inquiry demonstrated the unsoundness of the philosophers’ method of denying the attributes. They also demonstrated their inability to establish a proof that He is not a body—indeed, their inability to establish a proof of divine oneness—and explained that His being a body could be ruled out only through the first method: that of the Muʿtazilah, concerning which al-Ashʿarī made the remarks just mentioned.

Thus, when the most intelligent and accomplished rational thinkers on each side challenge the premises of the other side’s argument, on which that side claims to base its denial, this is evidence that those premises are not self-evident. For self-evident truths cannot be impugned. If, however, it is said: “These people