[anything] (1) other than Himself. This is like His inspiring His servants to call upon Him, [so they call upon Him] (2), and He answers them; and His inspiring them to obey Him, so they obey Him and He rewards them. Thus He—glorified be He—is the One who brings about both the response and the reward, just as He first caused His servants to call upon Him and obey Him. In none of this did He stand in need of anything other than Himself whatsoever.

Anyone who reflects upon these matters will see clearly that He—glorified be He—is the Creator of all things—both entities and their attributes and actions—through His volitional acts that subsist in Him, as the texts of the prophets indicate, as the early generations and leading scholars of the Muslim community unanimously affirmed, and as the foremost ancient philosophers agreed with them. This demonstrates the temporal origination of everything other than Him and shows that He is not an eternal cause of an eternal effect, even though He is perpetually active. His being perpetually active does not entail that some particular eternal effect must exist alongside Him. Rather, this is utterly false.

These philosophers, who hold that the world is eternal and proceeds from a being whose effect follows necessarily from its very essence and who is its eternal complete cause [of it] (3), concede that it is not, in pre-eternity, the complete cause of every temporal event. No one who understands what he is saying would make such a claim. A complete cause necessarily entails its effect and is directly followed by it. Therefore, if the effect came into existence after not having existed, that which necessarily entails it could not be eternal, for this would mean that the effect (4) was delayed and deferred for an endless span of time after the eternal complete cause. Indeed, every temporal event that comes into existence in the world stands at an infinite temporal remove (5) from pre-eternity. Thus, if its complete cause had been present in pre-eternity, the effect would have been