and this is the workmanship of Allah, who has perfected everything. All good is in His two hands. He is the Most Merciful of those who show mercy, and He is more merciful to His servants than a mother is to her child, as the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, affirmed with an oath:

“By Allah, Allah is more merciful to His servants than this mother is to her child.”

These and similar meanings affirm His all-encompassing wisdom, the perfection and excellence with which He created everything, and the vastness and greatness of His mercy, which precedes His wrath. All of this is true.

These two principles—the all-encompassing nature of His creation and Lordship, and the all-encompassing nature of His beneficence and wisdom—are two great principles. Yet some people disbelieve in part of the first, such as the Qadariyyah, who exclude human actions from His creation and attribute them solely to the action of an agent endowed with choice; or those who appeal to nature, who sever the attribution of action to Allah, glorified is He, and attribute it instead to an inherent nature, a body endowed with such a nature, a celestial sphere, a soul, or some other created thing. These creatures cannot sustain themselves and are even less capable of sustaining anything else.

Others deny part of the second principle or turn away from it, imagining that some of His creatures lack the excellence and perfection of His workmanship and His wisdom, and supposing His mercy to be limited and powerless. These include the Iblīs-like or Magian Qadariyyah and others.

Since this is so, all existing things are signs of Him: they bear witness to, indicate and reveal the most beautiful names and exalted attributes that rightfully belong to Him. He created all existing things in accordance with what His names and attributes entail. Thus, the tie of kinship (rahim) is a bond stemming from the All-Merciful (al-Rahmān): He created the tie of kinship and derived its name from His own; and He is the Provider