whenever He brings into being something that had not previously existed, they call it “change”; whenever He hears the supplication of His servants (1), they call it “change”; whenever He sees what He has created, they call it “change”; when He spoke to Moses son of Imrān, they call it “change”; and whenever He is pleased with those who obey Him and angry with those who disobey Him, they call it “change”—and similarly with other such matters (2).

Yet they deny all this without any proof (3) whatsoever. For the philosophers admit that something pre-eternal may be a locus of temporal events. (But) whoever among them denied what (he denied) (4) did so only because he rejected the attributes altogether; the same applies to the Mu'tazila. Hence, the most discerning (5) among both groups—such as Abū al-Husayn al-Basrī, Abū al-Barakāt, the author of al-Mu'tabar, and others—disagreed with them on this point. They demonstrated that they have no rational proof negating it and that both rational and scriptural proofs require its affirmation. All of this has been discussed at length elsewhere.

The point here is that whoever denies that He is a body, intending thereby to deny that He is composed of indivisible atoms (6) or of matter and form, is correct in the meaning he intends. His opponents, however, say that what he has stated is not what the term “body” denotes in ordinary language, nor is it the technical definition of a body. (7 For a body is composed neither of the former nor of the latter, whereas he says, “This is the technical definition of a body.” 7) (7).