to follow the path of the Sunnah, yet they knew no method other than this. They therefore argued from the creation of man, but instead of treating his creation as evidence, as the verse does, they treated it as something requiring proof. They supposed that the temporal origination of the accidents of the drop of semen was known self-evidently and through sense perception. As for its constituent atoms, they believed that all bodies are composed of indivisible atoms, and that creating man and other things consists merely in bringing accidents into existence in those atoms by combining and separating them, rather than bringing an entity itself into existence. Thus, they sought to establish by inference that man is created.

Once they had established that he is created, they said that he has a Creator. They argued that he is created by appealing to accidents: the drop of semen, the clot, and the lump of flesh are never free of temporally originated accidents. For, in their view, these consist of atoms that are sometimes combined and sometimes separated. They are therefore never free of combination and separation, both of which are temporally originated. Thus, man is never free of temporally originated events, and whatever is never free of such events is itself temporally originated, since a beginningless succession of events is impossible.

This is the method al-Ash‘arī followed in Gleams in Refutation of the People of Innovation, on which his followers wrote numerous commentaries, and likewise in his Epistle to the People of the Frontier. He cited the words of Allah Most High:

“Have you considered the semen you emit?”

“Is it you who create it, or