He does not will it to occur on its own. For when He wills to create Zayd from ʿAmr, He does not will to create him from someone else. When He wills to send down rain through which the earth produces vegetation, He wills to send it down in that particular manner. When He wills that a group of people travel by sea, with some drowning, others surviving, and others making a profit, He wills precisely that combination. The same applies to faith and disbelief: He has joined faith with bliss for its adherents, and disbelief with punishment for its adherents. Yet, in their view, He does not make anything a cause of anything else or create anything for a wise purpose; rather, He merely places one thing alongside another.

In their view, He places happiness alongside faith, not through it, just as they say that He creates satiety at the time of eating, not through eating. Thus, the religion He has commanded is that with which He has joined its adherent’s happiness in the Hereafter. As for disbelief, sinful defiance, and disobedience, they hold that He loves and approves of them just as He wills them. However, He does not love them together with happiness for the person who commits them. Hence, He does not love them as religion, just as He does not will them as religion accompanied by happiness for their adherent.

This is the vision beheld by those who experience self-effacement in affirming the oneness of divine lordship. They saw that the Lord, Exalted is He, created everything by His will and knew that whatever He willed would come to pass. In their view, nothing has a cause or a wise purpose; rather, all events occur by will.

Now, Jahm ibn Safwān and those who deny the divine attributes among the Muʿtazilah and others like them do not affirm a will subsisting in His essence. Rather, they either deny it, interpret it as meaning creation and command, or say, “He brought into being a will without a locus.”

As for those who affirm the divine attributes, such as Ibn Kullāb, al-Ashʿarī, and others—among those who affirm