Whoever reflects on this subject and others like it will find that the people of innovation and misguidance gain the upper hand over a group professing adherence to the Sunnah and guidance only because that group has itself adopted some other innovation or error—especially when it has agreed with its opponents on that point. They then argue against it on the basis of those concessions and press their implications until, if they can, they draw its members out of the religion as easily as a hair is drawn from dough. This is what the esoteric Qarmatians, the philosophers, and others like them have done to certain groups of Muslims.
The “Muʿtazilah” gained the upper hand over the “Ashʿarīs” and others who affirm the divine attributes and decree through their agreement with them in denying acts subsisting in Allah Most High. They thereby undermined the very principle their opponents had used against them to establish that Allah’s speech is uncreated: namely, that when speech or anything similar is created in a subject, the corresponding description applies to that subject.
They also gained the upper hand over them through this concession on the “question of divine decree,” forcing them into holding that the very evil deeds committed by the servant are acts of Allah, the Lord of the worlds, rather than of the servant. They then affirmed an acquisition that has no reality, for no intelligible distinction exists between acquisition and action in terms of the relation of power to its object. Hence people began to ridicule those who held this view, saying:
“Three things have no reality: al-Nazzām’s leap, Abū Hāshim’s states, and al-Ashʿarī’s acquisition.”
They also forced them to explain the efficacy of power upon its object as mere customary conjunction. Yet customary conjunction occurs between anything and its necessary concomitant, and between the object of power and power itself. There is therefore no more reason to regard one as exerting an effect upon the other than the reverse. It also occurs between an effect and its cause