Thus He rejected their belief that they had been created without anything that created them, or that they had created themselves. This is why Jubayr ibn Mut‘im said:

“When I heard the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, recite this surah, I felt my heart split open.”

If the nonexistent were a thing, this rejection would not be conclusive, since one could say that they were indeed created by something, but that this thing was nonexistent. Their creator would thus be a nonexistent thing.

Allah Most High said:

“Such people will enter Paradise and will not be wronged in the least.”

If the nonexistent were a thing, the meaning would be: they will not be wronged in respect of anything existent or nonexistent. Yet they cannot conceivably be deprived unjustly of something nonexistent, since it is not theirs.

As for His statement:

“Indeed, the shaking of the Hour is a tremendous thing,”

this describes the shaking when it occurs as a tremendous thing; it does not describe the shaking in its present state. This is why He said:

“On the Day you see it, every nursing mother will forget the child she is nursing.”

If the Hour were intended by it, the meaning would be that it is a tremendous thing in knowledge and decree.

His statement, Most High:

“Our word to a thing, when We intend it, is only to say to it, ‘Be,’ and it is,”

has been cited as evidence by those who say that the nonexistent is a thing, whereas it is evidence against them. For He states that He wills the thing and brings it into being. According to them, however, it subsists in nonexistence, and only its existence is willed, not the thing itself. Yet the Quran states that the thing itself is willed and comes into being. This is one of the subsidiary questions arising from this issue.

The position of the people of the Sunnah and the Community, and of rational people generally, is that essences are brought into being; that the essence of every thing is identical with its existence; and that a thing’s existence is not something additional to its essence. Rather, in external reality there is only the thing itself: its very self, its essence, and its reality. Its existence and subsistence in external reality are not additional to that.