others, who rejected it.”
He said:
“Our position on this is that the Quran attests to the correctness of what we maintain: that Allah, Mighty and Majestic, requires His creatures to perform acts of obedience both within and beyond their capacity.”
Then, at the end of the section, he said:
“Someone might challenge our position, saying: ‘If Allah may impose upon a servant what is beyond his capacity, then He may require a blind person to work with colours, a paralysed person to walk, and someone without hands to grasp things, and so forth.’ He should be answered as follows: Ibn ʿAbbās said concerning the words of the Exalted:
‘We shall gather them on the Day of Resurrection on their faces’:
‘This means that they will walk on their faces.’ Ibn ʿAbbās’s explanation of walking on their faces thus disposes of every objection they have raised.”
He then said:
“Abū al-Hasan—meaning al-Ashʿarī—has provided sufficient clarification of these matters in the statements we previously quoted from him.”
Al-Qādī Abū Yaʿlā, after quoting the statements of Abū al-Hasan—meaning Abū al-Hasan al-Ashʿarī—said:
“He distinguished between what a person can do, with no intrinsic impossibility involved, which may therefore be imposed as an obligation, and what is impossible, which may not.”
He said:
“The apparent wording of Abū al-Hasan al-Ashʿarī leaves open both possibilities regarding that which cannot possibly exist: may it validly be imposed as an obligation or not?”
He said:
“The correct position is the distinction we have set out. This concerns, first, what a person cannot do because it is intrinsically impossible, such as a command to do the impossible: combining two opposites, making something that came into existence beginningless, or making something beginningless come into existence. It also includes what a person cannot do because of incapacity, such as a paralysed person who cannot stand or a mute person who cannot speak. Obligations of this kind may not be imposed.
“And (the second category: what a person cannot do, neither because it is intrinsically impossible nor because he is incapable of it, but