the celestial spheres; therefore one cannot claim that the enumeration is exhaustive unless it can first be shown that no other bodies exist, and they possess no such proof. On the contrary, decisive evidence has established the existence of entities that subsist in their own right above the spheres, as has been set out elsewhere.

They also dispute whether the Necessary Existent falls under the category of substance. Aristotle and the early philosophers did place Him within the genus of substance, whereas Ibn Sīnā refused to do so. Yet Aristotle and his followers never spoke of a “Necessary Existent”; they spoke instead of the “First Cause” or the “Prime Principle.” Nowhere in Aristotle’s writings do we find a division of existents into “necessary in themselves” and “possible in themselves” while still maintaining their eternity. For Aristotle, what is “possible”—that which can both exist and not exist—can only be something originated in time. The later among them—atheistic thinkers who claimed affiliation with Islam, such as Ibn Sīnā and the like—were the ones who introduced this two-fold division, offering it as a substitute for the theologians’ classification of beings into eternal and originated. They fashioned a method that spliced together the reasoning of the mutakallimūn with that of their own predecessors: just as the theologians argued from composition to temporal origination, Ibn Sīnā argued from composition to contingency.

A word now on the statement of the Friend, upon him be peace—“This is my Lord.”

Some commentators claimed that Abraham’s words, “I do not love those that set” (Q 6:76), refer to moving bodies, on the grounds that motion is an event, and an event can exist only in something itself originated; motion, then, is a mark of origination. Accordingly, Abraham reasoned from the presence of motion to the origination of the moving body, meaning: I do not love the originated beings in whom events occur.

Others replied: rather, setting—which is motion—shows that the moving body is contingent, even were it eternal without beginning. They maintained that setting is a descent into the domain of possibility, and that Abraham’s words “I do not love those that set” signify: I do not love the contingent, even if the contingent were everlasting.

The early theologians expressed the rational proof by saying, “Every changing thing is originated; the world changes; therefore the world is originated.” Al-Rāzī, in his Maḥṣūl, reformulated it thus: “Every changing thing is contingent; the world changes; therefore the world is contingent.”