perfection. His attributes are not excluded from what His name denotes. Rather, whoever says, “I worshipped Allah and called upon Allah,” has worshipped His essence, endowed with the attributes of perfection that befit Him. His essence cannot exist without its inseparable attributes.

Then, when followers of Aristotle—such as Ibn Sīnā and others like him—discussed prophethood and considered what the prophets had taught—that Allah speaks, that He truly spoke to Moses, and that He is the Creator of everything—they began distorting the prophets’ words from their proper meanings. They say: “Origination is of two kinds: intrinsic and temporal. We hold that the celestial sphere is temporally originated, meaning that it is an effect, even though it is beginninglessly eternal and has always existed alongside Allah.” They also said that it is created in this sense. Yet the divine Scriptures state that Allah created the heavens and the earth in six days, whereas what is beginninglessly eternal cannot come into existence within a span of days.

It is known with certainty that when the messengers declared that Allah created everything, or that He created such and such, they meant that He created it and brought it into existence after it had not existed, as He said:

“I created you before, when you were nothing.”

Sound reason agrees with this and recognizes that what is acted upon, created, and fashioned cannot be simultaneous in time with its agent, but must come after it, and that acting necessarily entails bringing the object of the act into existence.