milk, and like olive oil and sesame oil in sesame seeds and olives. These views have been discussed at length elsewhere.

“The point here” is that the fundamental premise that led them astray was their assertion that anything in which attributes, acts, voluntary activities, or temporal events subsist must have a beginning. They then said that a body is never free of temporal events, and sought to establish this through various arguments. Some said that it is never free of the four states: motion, rest, conjunction, and separation. Others mentioned only motion and rest. Still others said that it is never free of accidents, that all accidents have a beginning, and that they do not persist for two successive moments. This is al-Āmidī’s approach, which he claimed most adherents of the Ash'arī school relied upon. Al-Rāzī relied on the argument from motion and rest.

These arguments, together with everything they adduced to establish that bodies have a beginning and are contingent, have been discussed at length. In that discussion, we cited their own statements demonstrating the invalidity of all these arguments. They themselves exposed the invalidity of everything adduced to establish that bodies have a beginning and are contingent, refuting these arguments one by one through their own discussions, as has been explained at length elsewhere.

As for the Hishāmiyyah, the Karrāmiyyah, and others who maintain that He is a beginningless body, they shared the fundamental premise of this doctrine. However, they did not maintain that every body has a beginning, nor