reason that indicates [any of] (1) that? All that you and others like you adduce indicates only the perpetuity of action, not the perpetuity of any particular act or any particular effect. What proof, then, do you have for the perpetual existence of the celestial sphere, the matter of the celestial sphere (2), the intellects, the souls, or anything else that the proponents of eternity claim to be eternal and beginningless—always having been and always remaining alongside the Lord Most High, eternal with His eternity and everlasting with His everlastingness?
They must first be challenged to furnish proof, yet they have no sound proof for this whatsoever (3). Rather, they were emboldened only by their disputants among the theologians and philosophers (4), who said that speech and action as a category became possible after having been impossible, without anything new occurring; that the agent became capable of them after not having been capable; that He brings originated events into being outside time; and that the Pre-Eternal had always remained inactive, neither acting nor speaking from eternity, until He spoke and acted (5).
Then many of them say that He will cease to act and speak, so Paradise and Hell will cease to exist, or movement within them will cease—as Jahm ibn Safwān asserted regarding the passing away of Paradise and Hell, and Abū al-Hudhayl [al-Allāf] (6) regarding the cessation of movements. They thus made the period of the Lord’s action and speech vanishingly brief in comparison with beginningless and endless eternity.