the full moon. If you say, “Whatever is like this is a body and has come into being,” this would be an innovation contrary to language, revelation, and reason. If you say, “We call whatever is like this a body and say that it is composite,” the reply is: This designation you have invented is among the names for which Allah has sent down no authority.
Anyone who takes realities known through revelation and reason and gives them repellent names to turn people away from them is told: The dispute concerns meanings, not words—even if those words conform to the language. How, then, when they are your own inventions? Clearly, realities established by revelation and reason cannot be dismissed by such groundless verbal disputes.
As for their claim that anything in which attributes subsist, toward which hands are raised, and which people can see with their own eyes must necessarily be composed of indivisible atoms or of matter and form, this is not conceded. Indeed, the majority of rational thinkers—including speculative thinkers, jurists, and others—consider it false, as has been explained at length in its proper place.
The majority said: As for the Kullābiyyah’s distinction between realities unconnected with His will and power and realities connected with His will and power—the latter being termed “temporal occurrences,” while some of them call attributes “accidents” on the grounds that an accident does not endure for two successive moments—the reply is as follows:
The claim that an accident, such as blackness, whiteness, length, shortness, and the like, does not endure for two successive moments is a doctrine newly introduced into Islam, which none of the early generations or the imams upheld. It contradicts the position held by the vast majority of rational thinkers across all