and their inseparability from bodies, and from the impossibility of a beginningless succession of events, that bodies came into existence—they have not established the existence of the Maker, given the known invalidity of this argument. For they claim that the Lord cannot speak by His will or do whatever He wills. Indeed, their position ultimately implies that He cannot have always possessed power. Their arguments for this impossibility have been presented in full elsewhere, along with their own statements demonstrating the invalidity of those arguments.

As for their denial of the Creator, the implication of their position is that any being who has always spoken at will must have a beginning. It would therefore follow that the Lord has a beginning and is not eternal. Indeed, their fundamental principle implies that anything in which attributes and acts subsist must have come into existence. Every existent must possess attributes and acts, so it would follow that every existent came into existence.

For this reason, the leading proponents of this approach—the Jahmiyyah and the Muʿtazilah—explicitly denied the Lord’s attributes and denied that acts or any other matters subject to His will subsist in His Essence, since this is what their argument entails. Yet these attributes necessarily belong to Him, and denying a necessary concomitant entails denying that which it necessarily accompanies. Thus, their position ultimately amounts to negating the Lord and denying His existence.

They call attributes “accidents,” and acts and the like “events.” They therefore said, “The Lord must be held to transcend having accidents and events subsist in Him, for that would entail His being a body.”

They said:

“We have established a proof that every body came into existence. For