When Allah, glorified be He, creates His servants’ acts, this is akin to His creating their attributes: it is they who possess those attributes. Thus, when He makes some things black and others white, tall or short, moving or still, knowledgeable or ignorant, capable or incapable, alive or dead, believing or disbelieving, blessed or wretched, wrongdoers or wronged, it is the created being that is described as white or black, tall or short, alive or dead, a wrongdoer or someone wronged, and so forth. Allah, glorified be He, does not thereby acquire any of these descriptions. His bringing into being an act that constitutes injustice committed by one person against another is comparable to His bringing eating and drinking into being: one individual does the eating and another is eaten, yet He is thereby neither the eater nor the eaten. There are many comparable examples. Although there are profound purposes of wisdom in His creating His servants’ acts, whether their effects remain with them or extend to others—just as there is profound wisdom in His creating their attributes and all other created things—this is not the place to explain that in detail. These two arguments have exposed the Qadariyyah’s misrepresentation.

As for the definitions advanced against them, these are mere assertions that also contradict what is known from revelation, language, and reason, or else contain some ambiguity. To say, “A wrongdoer is someone in whom injustice subsists,” entails that injustice must indeed subsist in him. But he may be asked: “Even if he does not perpetrate or command it—or must he be its perpetrator