If it is said that this act subsisting in Him requires another act, distinct from power and will, to bring it into existence—for if power and will alone were sufficient, they would suffice to bring the created thing into existence; yet since an act of creation is indispensable, this act of creation comes into existence after not having existed and subsists in Him—then its fully sufficient cause necessarily entails it and is followed by it, just like the fully sufficient cause of speech arising in His essence.

When a human being speaks, his speech, both its wording and its meaning, is preceded by another act. There must be a movement followed by the production of the letters that constitute speech. That movement is what makes the speech Arabic or non-Arabic, and it is an act subsisting in the agent. This newly occurring act of making likewise comes about through a fully sufficient cause preceding it.

The Lord’s essence is what necessitates all of this. It necessitates the second act on condition that the first has ended, not while the first is occurring. Its necessitating the second is an act subsisting in Him after the first. His essence necessitates this causal act, then another, then another. Every causal act is caused by what precedes it and is a condition for what follows it. None of these acts is created, even though they are “temporally originated.”

If someone says, “I call this ‘creation,’” his disagreement is merely verbal. He is told: Those who said, “The Quran is created,” did not mean this, nor was this what the early generations and the imams rejected. They rejected only the view of those who regarded it as a created thing separate from Allah, as stated by