authenticated on the authority of Umm Salamah:

“Then Allah resolved on my behalf.”

Likewise, in Muslim’s introduction:

“He resolved on my behalf.”

Whether or not this is called “resolve,” when He, glorified is He, decrees things, He knows that He will do them at their appointed times and wills to do them at those times. When the time comes, there must be both the will to perform the particular act and the act itself, and He must know what He is doing.

There are two well-known views concerning whether His knowledge of what He is doing is the same as His prior knowledge of what He would do, and whether His knowledge that He has done it is the same as that earlier knowledge. Reason and the Quran indicate that this involves something additional, as He says, “so that We may know,” in more than ten passages. Ibn ʿAbbās explained: “Only so that We may see.”

Thus, His willing a particular thing is favored by His knowledge of the consideration within it that favors His willing it. Will therefore follows knowledge. That particular thing’s possession of those favoring attributes exists only in knowledge and conception; it has no external existence. This is where those who said, “The nonexistent is a thing,” went wrong: they affirmed that the object of will existed externally. As for someone who does not affirm it as a thing in knowledge, or who holds that there is only a will