the one that brings about the second, and no one has ever held that an agent’s effect occurs at the very same moment as the agent.

As for the example they put forward of a “rational cause” that accompanies its effect—namely, knowledge and the state of being a knower—the answer is that, according to the vast majority of thinkers, there is here no cause and no effect at all: knowledge itself is identical with knower-hood. This is the view espoused by most dialecticians, both among the Sunnis and among the sects, for they deny the real existence of so-called “states” (aḥwāl); hence there is neither cause nor effect. Even if one wished to label as the “effect” the judgment that a person is a knower, or the verbal assertion that he is a knower, such a judgment plainly comes after the act of knowing. And on the view of those who do affirm “states,” they maintain that a state is neither existent nor non-existent, so it cannot be likened to effects that actually come into being.

Furthermore, these same people say that the knower is the agent of knower-hood, yet he does not “produce” knower-hood, nor do they place this in the category of existential causation like other causes and effects. A person’s being a knower is merely a necessary concomitant of knowledge: wherever knowledge is found, it is knowledge. This bears no resemblance to severing a neck causing death, or eating causing satiety—causal links that Allah Himself created—let alone to the artificial causes invented by human beings, such as the statement, “If you commit fornication you are divorced,” in which one contingent event is suspended upon another and the first is pronounced the cause of the second. What imaginable kinship is there between this and knowledge and knower-hood? They were deceived only by the shared term “cause.”

So too with the philosophers: in none of the illustrations they offer is an efficient cause found to coincide in time with its effect. The movement of the hand is not what produces the movement of the ring; rather, one and the same mover sets both in motion, and the two motions correspond merely because the ring is attached to the hand, just as one part of the hand moves together with another. Thus one says, “I moved my hand and the ring moved,” or, “I moved my palm and my fingers moved,” yet the palm’s movement does not cause the fingers to move. Even if one assumes that the palm’s motion precedes that of the fingers, their simultaneity is still unproven; they are like successive instants within a single continuous span of time—no gap separates them even though the second instant is contiguous with the first. The same applies to the segments of any motion, such as the movement of a shadow: each segment comes into existence after the one before it, during the time that follows the first segment’s motion. To claim that the two motions occur together and that one produces the other is therefore false.

Moreover, it is commonly understood that when someone says, “I moved my hand and my ring moved,” or, “the key…"