This objection does not apply to the early generations. For if their opponents say, “Speech is like action, and neither we nor you hold that He was acting in pre-eternity,” the early generations and the Muslim majority reject this premise, saying: “Rather, He has always been creating and acting.” This is the position of the early generations and the majority of Muslim groups. It is also what Ibn Khuzaymah’s associates stated in what they wrote to him, although they were Kullābīs. Thus, this must have been either Ibn Kullāb’s position or that of a group of his followers. On this basis, their argument holds. Otherwise, if someone concedes that He began to act after not acting, this argument is undermined by his own premise, and his opponents can say: “What is said about His speech applies equally to His action.”

The view that the act of creating is distinct from the created thing, and that it is an act subsisting in the Lord, is the position of most Muslims. It is the position of the Hanafīs and most Hanbalīs, and the position to which al-Qādī Abū Ya‘lā ultimately returned. It is what al-Baghawī reported from Ahl al-Sunnah, and what Abū Bakr al-Kalābādhī reported from the Sufis in his book al-Ta‘arruf li-madhhab al-tasawwuf (An Introduction to the Sufi Way). It is also what al-Bukhārī reported as the scholars’ consensus in his book Af‘āl al-‘ibād (The Actions of Allah’s Servants), and what Ibn ‘Abd al-Barr and others reported from Ahl al-Sunnah.

But is action a single pre-eternal reality, like will? Or does it originate within His Essence? Or is it a kind of activity with which He has always been characterized? Muslims hold three positions on this. They all agree that everything other than Allah has been brought into existence and is created, as has been transmitted from the prophets through innumerable reports and established by rational proofs. The claim that alongside Allah there is something eternal among His effects, which He preceded—as some philosophers maintain—is invalid according to both reason and revelation, as has been explained at length elsewhere.