and the other side argues that an act is something created by Allah, Mighty and Majestic: when He creates an act in a person, that person performs it.”

Likewise, anyone who maintains that a person has only one capacity, enabling him both to act and to refrain from acting, and that when acting he needs no assistance from Allah Most High to enable him to act, and who equates Allah’s favor upon the believer and the unbeliever, the righteous and the wicked, is in error. Such people belong to the Qadariyyah, from whom he turned away during those well-known days. Their position was that, while performing a righteous deed, a person has no need of Allah Most High beyond what he had already received before acting (1), and that Allah Most High has bestowed no greater favor upon those who believe in Him and obey Him than upon those who disbelieve in Him and disobey Him. This position is unquestionably wrong. Hence, Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamāʿah have unanimously judged those who hold it to be misguided.

Beyond this, much of their disagreement over these matters is verbal, while some concerns conceptual distinctions—for example, their dispute over whether an accident endures, upon which they based their view of whether capacity endures. Yet the best formulations and conceptual distinctions are those that accord with the Quran, the Sunnah, and the consensus of this community’s early generations and leading scholars. What is required is to make the texts of the Quran and Sunnah the authoritative foundation that must be followed and whose wording may be used without qualification; to withhold disputed expressions, whether affirming or denying them, pending clarification and detailed explanation; and to prohibit