So neither is motion the producer of sound; the sun is merely a condition for the ray, and motion a condition for sound.

As for an agent that originates its effect while being contemporaneous with it in time, such a thing is never found. The word “cause” itself is equivocal: the efficient cause is one thing, and the cause that is only a condition is something else. A condition may coincide in time with what is conditioned, whereas the agent must necessarily precede the particular effect with his act. Even if it were assumed that the agent has always been acting, every segment of the action would still be preceded by another segment; although the species of action is everlasting, it is inconceivable that his act or its particular effect should be co-eternal with Allah, without beginning or end. And if it is said that He has always been acting by His will, then the perpetual continuity of the kind of action is one matter, while the perpetual continuity of a specific action and a specific effect is quite another.

What the messengers have conveyed, what sound reason attests, and what the vast majority of rational people—early and late—have agreed upon is that Allah is the Creator of all things, and that everything apart from Him is His creation. Every created thing is originated and preceded by non-existence. As for these people’s alteration of the word “originated” and their assertion, “We maintain that it is originated by an intrinsic origination, meaning that it is an effect,” this is nothing but twisting words from their proper places. For it is well known that the originated is that which was not and then came to be—an effect that an originator brought into existence. Whatever has always existed and will always exist, no rational person in any language calls it originated; nor does anyone call it a made, produced, or created thing, or say that it is contingent—capable of existing or not existing—except this small band of philosophers.

The rational balance is the innate knowledge of similarity and difference:

These matters are treated at length elsewhere; the point here is that when people abandon this innate rational knowledge of particulars in favor of universal syllogisms whose terms they themselves coin, those terms become ambiguous, encompassing both truth and falsehood. The result is misguidance that runs counter to the very purpose of balances; these balances become biased rather than just, and they fall under the description of the defrauders: “those who, when they take measure from the people, take in full” (Qurʾan 83:2).