al-Rāzī at the beginning of al-Matālib al-‘Āliya (The Lofty Pursuits). They thus claimed that the messengers conveyed no report concerning this issue, let alone explained the rational proofs confirming what they conveyed.

We have discussed elsewhere the unsoundness of what he said on this matter. Our purpose here is to draw attention to the approach of those who sought to combine the proofs of both groups and claimed to possess “the brilliant response.” Al-Rāzī presented this approach in his books and favored it. Al-Armawī adopted it from him and mentioned it in the Book of Forty, and al-Qushayrī al-Misrī adopted it from him. This position resembles the doctrine of the Harnānians, who maintained the existence of five eternal entities—a doctrine that Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī defended and wrote about. Al-Rāzī lends support to this doctrine in his compendium and elsewhere, although it is internally contradictory, as Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Balkhī, Abū Hātim—the author of Kitāb al-Zīna (The Book of Adornment)—and others demonstrated by exposing its unsoundness. Nevertheless, there is a difference between the doctrine of the Harnānians and that of these thinkers, as we shall explain, if Allah wills.

These thinkers said: “The speculative theologians established proofs only that bodies came into being. For it was bodies that they showed could not be devoid of events that come into being; and whatever cannot be devoid of such events must itself have come into being, since an unceasing succession of events without a beginning is impossible.”

They said: “The speculative theologians offered no proof ruling out the existence of anything other than bodies and the Maker. The philosophers, however, affirmed other existents: intellects and souls.”

They said: “The speculative theologians established no proof that these do not exist, and their proof that things came into being did not encompass them.”