are made about Him, not qualities subsisting in Him, as the Jahmiyyah and Muʿtazilah maintain.

Thus, when they say that attributes are divided into attributes of essence and attributes of action, they mean that the statements made about Him sometimes concern His essence and sometimes concern created things. They recognize no attributes subsisting in Him. Whoever understands attributes in this way can divide them into three categories: attributes of essence, of meaning, and of action. But for those who understand attributes to mean what subsists in Him, this classification is incompatible with their own principles. They nevertheless adopted it from the former group, despite differing from them over what is meant by attributes. This classification appears in the writings of Abū al-Hasan and those who agree with him, such as al-Qādī Abū Yaʿlā, Abū al-Maʿālī, al-Bājī, and others.

The second view is that acts subsist in Him. This is the position of the early Muslim generations and the majority of those who affirm the attributes. Al-Bukhārī states in The Creation of Human Acts that the scholars unanimously agree on this: there is a Creator, an act of creation, and a created thing. Al-Baghawī presents it as the position of Ahl al-Sunnah, and Abū Nasr Muhammad ibn Ishāq al-Kalābādhī states in An Introduction to the Doctrines of Sufism that it is the position of the Sufis. It is also the position of the Hanafis and is well known among them; they call it