fully by virtue of their relation to the Creator, namely their dependence on Him and on His will and power. In this respect they exist, whereas considered in themselves they can only be nonexistent.

They may also interpret in this sense the words of Labīd:

“Indeed, everything apart from Allah is vain.”

Nor should it be said that this proposition is correct in itself, for things would not exist had Allah not created them, nor would they endure had He not sustained them.

Speculative thinkers have debated the reason for their dependence on Him. Is it temporal origination—so that they need Him only when they are brought into being, as maintained by those among the Jahmiyyah, the Muʿtazilah, and others who hold this view? Or is it contingency, which is thought to obtain without temporal origination, with the contingent, caused being instead being eternal and beginningless, and its dependence during its continued existence being possible without temporal origination, as Ibn Sīnā and a group of others maintain?

Both views are mistaken, as has been explained at length elsewhere. It has also been shown that contingency and temporal origination necessarily entail one another. This is the position of the great majority of rational thinkers, both earlier and later, including even the ancient philosophers such as Aristotle and his followers. They too hold that every contingent being originates in time. It was only Ibn Sīnā and a group of others who differed with them on this point. For this reason, his fellow philosophers, such as Ibn Rushd and others, rejected this view of his.

Created beings depend on the Creator. Dependence is therefore an enduring, inseparable attribute of theirs: they never cease to need Him.