or choice, like the movement of trees when the winds blow, or the movement of … (1) caused by closing the hands. Comparable instances in human beings are the movements of someone suffering from fever, paralysis, or tremors. Every rational person recognizes an obvious difference between a person’s standing, sitting, praying, engaging in jihad, committing illicit sexual intercourse, or stealing, and the trembling of a paralytic or the shivering of someone with a fever. We know that, in the former case, the person has the power to act, intends the act, and chooses it, whereas in the latter he has no power over it, neither intends it nor chooses it.

Jahm and his followers, the “Jabriyyah” (proponents of compulsion), are reported to have claimed that all human acts belong to a single category. This position is plainly false. It is precisely the distinction between these two categories that divides acts into voluntary and involuntary, with commands and prohibitions applying only to voluntary acts. Neither revealed laws nor the words of any wise person contain a command directing a blind man to dot a copy of the Quran, a person unable to walk to run, or someone with a fever to remain motionless, or anything similar. Although people have differed over whether such commands are admissible on rational or revealed grounds, people of sound reason, of every persuasion, unanimously rule out their actual occurrence.

If it is said:

“Granted that the act I intended and chose occurs through my will and intention, are not that intention and that will themselves created by Allah Most High? If He creates that which necessitates the act, is it possible to refrain from acting while that necessitating cause exists? At most, the difference is that the first is compulsion without the mediation of the servant’s will, whereas this is compulsion mediated through his will.”