and the realities of ultimate outcomes, the particular allocations and distinctions made among individuals and concrete entities, and the other universal aspects of divine decree that are not confined to the question of the creation of the servants’ acts? This request for a ruling does not concern those matters, and this is not the place to explain even their broad outlines, let alone any of their details.

It suffices a person of understanding to know that Allah—mighty and majestic—is All-Knowing, All-Wise, and Merciful: His wisdom has dazzled minds, His mercy encompasses everything, His knowledge embraces everything, and His Tablet and Pen have recorded it all. Allah Most High has, within His decree, a guarded secret and hidden knowledge that He has withheld from all His creatures and reserved exclusively for Himself. People of knowledge and His close servants attain only some broad insights into this. They may not be permitted to mention certain matters, and people may be addressed about it according to their capacity to understand.

Moses, Jesus, and Ezra asked our Lord—blessed and exalted is He—about an aspect of the secret of divine decree: that if He willed to be obeyed, He would be obeyed, yet He is nevertheless disobeyed. He—glorified and exalted is He—informed them that this was His secret.

In this realm, the minds of many creatures have wandered in bewilderment. Here too, those who hold that the world has no beginning went astray, maintaining that its Maker necessarily produces effects by virtue of His essence and necessarily entails them of Himself, as a cause entails its effect, and that nothing more perfect than what He has made is possible. Some of this malady crept into certain People of the Scripture and followers of the messengers, who asserted that what is possible is confined to what actually exists. All this was an attempt to escape the difficulty of explaining divine acts and the existence of originated causes for originated events. The Qadarites explained this through their own unsound rationales concerning judgments of justice and permissibility and the obligation to provide what is beneficial