are like the servant’s power: none has any effect on the events, acts, or effects with which it is associated. Rather, the Creator has conjoined one with another without any cause or wise purpose whatsoever.

They also said that obedience and disobedience stand in the same relation to reward and punishment: there is nothing in obedience that makes reward fitting, nor anything in disobedience that makes punishment fitting. Nor was there any wisdom in commands and prohibitions for the sake of which He commanded and prohibited. In sending the messengers, He did not intend mercy toward His servants or their welfare. Rather, He intended to grant bliss to one group and punish another, without any wise purpose. The means to this is His making commands and prohibitions, obedience and disobedience, signs of that outcome, without any cause or wise purpose. They also hold that He may command anything—even associating partners with Him, rejecting the messengers, injustice, and indecencies—and forbid anything—even worshipping Him alone, believing in the messengers, and obeying them.

Many of these, such as Abū al-Hasan and his followers, together with those later followers of Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, and Ahmad who agreed with them—such as Ibn ʿAqīl, Ibn al-Jawzī, and others like them—say that the act of creation is the created thing, and that an act is the thing produced by it. They have made the servants’ acts acts of Allah, while an act, according to them, is the thing produced by it. On this basis, it cannot also be an act of the servant, lest a single act have two agents.

The majority, however, say that these acts are created and produced by Allah, while being acts of the servant that subsist in him. They are not acts of Allah subsisting in Him; rather, what He produces is distinct from His act. And the Lord