and is not what is meant by coercive compulsion; only Allah has the power to do this.

This is why the Qadariyyah and the Jabriyyah have taken diametrically opposed positions. Each is correct in what it affirms, but not in what it denies. Abū al-Husayn al-Basrī and those Qadariyyah who agree with him maintain that knowing that a person brings about his own actions and conduct is self-evident knowledge, and that denying this is sophistry. Ibn al-Khatīb and others among the Jabriyyah maintain that it is self-evident that a person’s acting rather than refraining requires a determining factor beyond that person. For when the two alternatives of a contingent possibility are equally balanced, neither can prevail over the other without a determining factor. Both statements are correct, but the claim that either necessarily entails the negation of the other is incorrect.

A person brings his actions into being and acquires them, but this bringing into being itself requires someone to bring it about. A person acts, makes, and brings things into being; yet his becoming someone who does so, after not having been so, necessarily requires an agent. As Allah says:

“For whoever among you wills to follow the straight path.”

When a person wills to follow the straight path, he becomes upright. Then Allah says:

“But you do not will unless Allah, Lord of all worlds, wills.”

Everything known self-evidently, and everything established by scriptural and rational proofs, is true.

Thus, there is neither might nor power except through Allah. A person’s need for Allah is intrinsic to him—in his being, his attributes, and his actions—even though he possesses a being, attributes, and actions of his own. Denying his actions is therefore like denying his attributes and his very being: it is a denial of the truth, akin to the excesses of extremist Sufis who identify him with the Real. Or to regard anything pertaining to him as independent of Allah or existing without Him is a denial of the truth, akin to the excess of the one who said: