and this is our position, provided that by “spirit” he does not mean the soul. For he said:

“The spirit present in the body is of two kinds: one is the life subsisting in it, and the other is breath. Breath is air that spreads through it.”

What is meant by breath is the particles of air released through the pores and expelled in breathing. This is the view of al-Isfarāyīnī and others. Ibn Fūrak said that it is what flows through the cavities of the organs. Abū al-Maʿālī disagreed with them—and rightly so—saying:

“The spirit consists of subtle bodies interwoven with perceptible bodies. Allah has established the customary order whereby bodies remain alive so long as these subtle bodies remain interwoven with them. When they separate from them, death follows life, in accordance with that continuing customary order.”

The position of the Companions, those who followed them in righteousness, the rest of the early generations of the Muslim community, and the leading scholars of the Sunnah is that the spirit is an entity subsisting in itself, which departs from the body and experiences bliss or punishment. It is neither the body nor any part of it, such as the breath mentioned above.

Since Imam Ahmad explicitly affirmed this, as did other imams, his followers did not disagree on this point. Some of them, however, such as al-Qādī Abū Yaʿlā, claimed that it is a body and that it is the air moving back and forth through the body’s passages, in agreement with one of the two meanings mentioned by Ibn al-Bāqillānī. Since these views were among the weakest, many people used them to gain the upper hand over their proponents.