and say that these states are neither existent nor nonexistent, as maintained by Abū Hāshim, the two qādīs—Abū Bakr and Abū Ya‘lā—and Abū al-Ma‘ālī al-Juwaynī in the earlier of his two positions.

Most people disagreed with them on this principle and affirmed that He, Most High, performs an act subsisting in His own Being, and that creation is distinct from the created thing—this is called “bringing into being.” This is the position of the early Kullābīs, as stated by al-Thaqafī, al-Duba‘ī, and other companions of Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Khuzayma in the creed they wrote and read to Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Ishāq ibn Khuzayma when the dispute concerning “the question of the Quran” arose among them. This was also the later of al-Qādī Abū Ya‘lā’s two positions, and is the position of the majority of Hanafīs and Hanbalīs and the leading scholars of the Mālikī and Shāfi‘ī schools. It is what al-Baghawī reported from Ahl al-Sunnah in Sharh al-Sunnah, and what al-Bukhārī reported as the consensus of the scholars, as has been explained at length elsewhere.

The “second principle” is their denial that matters connected with His power and will can subsist in Him. They call this “the inherence of temporal events.” Since they denied this, they deemed it impossible for any act performed by choice through His power and will to subsist in Him, whether intransitive or transitive: neither descending, coming, rising over the Throne, approaching, creating, giving life, causing death, nor anything else of this kind.

For this reason, they interpreted the early scholars’ statement concerning the descent—that “He does whatever He wills”—as meaning that a created thing separate from Him comes into being. Yet the early scholars’ words explicitly show that this was not what they meant. Rather, they meant an act performed by choice that subsists in Him.