Kullāb, in your view, is that he did not adopt it fully (1); rather, [a vestige] (2) of their teaching remained with him.

This resembles what Ibn Aqīl did concerning the Quran. He took the Mu'tazila’s argument with which they attacked the Ash'arīs for saying, “This Quran is not God’s speech, but rather an expression of it,” and he himself (3) then used it to attack the Ash'arīs. [The Mu'tazila’s purpose in doing so was to establish that the Quran is created, whereas the Ash'arīs] (4) take a better position than they do (5) in denying that the Quran is created. Their fault, however, lies [in] their failure to uphold the Sunnah fully (6).

[Likewise, some Sālimī adherents of hadith who wrote about the faults of Ibn Kullāb, al-Ash'arī, and Ibn Karrām related accounts, some of which are unquestionably false. These were fabricated against them by the Mu'tazila—their enemies—because they affirmed the attributes and the divine decree. These authors then came and repeated those accounts, intending to turn people away from what they believed to be erroneous in those men’s teachings. Yet those accounts had been fabricated by people who were farther from the Sunnah than the men they criticized. Similarly, the Sālimiyya—the followers of Shaykh Abū al-Hasan ibn Sālim—accord with Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamā'ah in most of their foundational doctrines. However, because errors appeared in some of their statements, those who wrote refutations of them went too far in responding to them, to the point that they even rejected some of what they had said that was true] (7).