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The Rāfidī (1) said:

“As for dialectical theology, it originated with him. People learned (2) it from his sermons, and everyone (3) is his pupil.”

The answer is that this statement is a lie and contains no praise. Any theological discourse that conflicts with the Book and the Sunnah is false, and Allah kept ‘Alī free of it. No one among the Companions or Successors argued for the temporal origination of the universe from the temporal origination of bodies, and then established the temporal origination of bodies through the argument from accidents, motion, and rest: bodies necessarily entail these and are never free of them; whatever does not predate temporal events must itself be temporally originated; and this is built on [the impossibility of] a beginningless series of temporal events.

Rather, this discourse first appeared in Islam after the first century, through al-Ja‘d ibn Dirham and al-Jahm ibn Safwān. It then passed to the followers of ‘Amr ibn ‘Ubayd, such as Abū al-Hudhayl al-‘Allāf and others like him.

‘Amr ibn ‘Ubayd and Wāsil ibn ‘Atā’ openly propounded doctrines only concerning the inevitable fulfillment of the divine threat—that whoever entered the Fire would never leave it—and the denial of divine decree. All of this is something from which (4) Allah kept ‘Alī free.