These people said:

“If we say that He spoke—uttering speech with both its letters and its meanings—by His will and power, we avoid these pitfalls without affirming anything objectionable according to either revelation or reason.”

The “seventh group” replied:

“But you have made Him incapable of speech in eternity past, bereft of perfection. Your position necessarily invites the following objection: if He did not speak from eternity past to eternity future, and then spoke, that would be a new occurrence requiring a newly occurring cause. The same argument would apply to that occurrence as to the first, necessarily entailing an infinite regress of events. If that is impossible, your position is invalid. If it is possible, then say that He has always spoken whenever He wills, as the imams of the Sunnah and the great majority of hadith scholars have said. You would then be describing your Lord as possessing the attributes of perfection eternally, without beginning or end.”

They added:

“This position is better than all the others, besides agreeing with reason and authentic transmitted evidence.”

Those others replied:

“This entails events with no beginning, which is impossible.”

The former answered:

“This is an innovated assertion that you have merely taken from the Mu‘tazilah. Neither the Book nor the Sunnah teaches it; none of the early generations of the Muslim community or its imams asserted it; nor does reason establish it. Rather, reason establishes its opposite.

“Those among the Mu‘tazilah who advanced this position, and their followers among the Karrāmiyyah and Ash‘ariyyah, thought that through it they could establish that the world came into being. They based this on the premise that bodies cannot be devoid of accidents that come into being, and that whatever cannot be devoid of things that come into being is