Aristotle and all other rational people on this matter. They explained that Ibn Sīnā’s position departed from that of his predecessors and the vast majority of rational people. His intention was to construct a doctrine combining the doctrines of the speculative theologians with that of his predecessors, making the contingent being an effect of the Necessary Being while nevertheless being beginningless and coeternal with Him. His followers, including al-Suhrawardī al-Halabī, al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, al-Tūsī and others, followed him in accepting this possibility. Al-Rāzī claimed in his Muhassal that the view that an effect brought about by a cause that acts by the necessity of its essence can be beginningless was agreed upon by the earlier philosophers whose statements have reached us, such as Aristotle and others like him. Yet this was only the view of Ibn Sīnā and those like him.

When the speculative theologians affirm the beginninglessness of the attributes and the like that subsist in the Beginningless One, they do not say that these are produced or are effects of an efficient cause. Rather, in their view, the beginningless essence possesses those attributes, which are inseparable from it. The Necessary Being cannot truly be necessary and beginningless without His inseparable attributes, as has been explained fully elsewhere. They also hold it impossible for a contingent being—which, considered apart from its agent, admits both existence and nonexistence—to be beginningless. Likewise, the leading philosophers hold it impossible for a beginningless being to admit nonexistence, and impossible for a contingent being to have always been necessary, whether it is said to be necessary in itself or through another.

But Ibn Sīnā’s and others’ claim that a contingent being may be beginningless, necessary through another, and eternal without beginning or end—as they maintain regarding the celestial sphere—is precisely what has exposed their account of “contingency” to objections that undermine their position and that they cannot answer, as has been explained fully elsewhere. For this is not the place for