and used it to wrong those Muslims who disputed with them, and opened a path for Islam’s enemy to achieve his aim. For their position really amounts to saying that the Lord had not been capable, nor had speech and action been possible for Him, and that He had always remained so for an unlimited duration—or a supposed duration—before He spoke and acted without any cause necessitating this. They identified the effect He produces with His act, and held His act and His will to act to be beginningless and eternal, while the effect came later. They also held that an agent possessing power selects one of two things within his power over the other without any determining factor. All this contradicts both sound reason and the Quran and Sunnah. They denied His attributes and the possibility of seeing Him, and said that His speech is created—all contrary to the religion of Islam.

Those who followed them while affirming the attributes said that He wills everything He wills by a single will, and that all the speech He has spoken or will speak is but one indivisible thing, admitting neither multiplicity nor division. They said that if He is seen, He is seen neither face-to-face nor by direct sight; and that He did not hear or see things until they existed, yet when they came into existence, no existent reality came to subsist in Him. Rather, His state before hearing and seeing was the same as His state thereafter. They made other such assertions that contradict sound reason and authentic transmitted evidence.

Then, when ‘the philosophers’ saw that this was the extent of these people’s knowledge and that this was the Islam they professed, and recognized its invalidity, they openly proclaimed their doctrine of the eternity of the world. They argued that action cannot arise after there had been none; rather, every new occurrence must have a cause that itself comes into being