entails that there is no eternal or necessary being. Yet they thought they had established an eternal, necessary being, when what they had established was impossible. Thus they had established neither an eternal nor a necessary being.

Then others among their Jahmī adherents saw this as wilful denial of the obvious. Since an eternal, necessary being must be affirmed, they said, “It is this world.” The early Jahmiyyah used to say, “He Himself is in every place,” whereas these others said, “He is identical with existing things, and the eternal, necessary being is none other than the originated, contingent being.” Indwelling was what the Jahmiyyah openly professed to people, so the early generations and the imams came to know it and refuted it. The reality of their position, however, is negation: that He is neither within the world nor outside it. But the imams had not heard this and knew it to be their position only through their concealed teachings.

For this reason, the imams reported that the Jahmiyyah held Him to be in every place, and also reported that they described Him through negative attributes. It became widely known that the Jahmiyyah described Him through negations, to the point that Abū Tammām said:

Jahmī in its attributes, yet adorned
With the beauties of all things.

They did not intend to deny the eternal, necessary being, for no rational person, whether Muslim or unbeliever, intends this. It contradicts what everyone knows through self-evident reason. For if all existing things are supposed to have come into being from nonexistence, it follows that all existing things came into being by themselves. Yet it is self-evidently known to reason that whatever comes into being