the beloved whom his lover seeks to emulate. Being a mover in this sense does not entail that He is the one who brings about the sphere’s conceptions, will, and movements.

Thus, their doctrine concerning the movement of the celestial sphere is of the same kind as the doctrine of the Qadariyya concerning the acts (1) of living beings. Yet these philosophers say that the motion of the celestial sphere is the cause of temporal events. The true import of their doctrine, therefore, is that all temporal events occur without anyone bringing them about whatsoever, and that Allah does nothing. Each context, however, has its appropriate discussion.

They regarded the highest science and first philosophy as the inward science concerned with existence and its concomitants. They divided existence into substance and accident, and then divided accidents into nine genera. Some reduced these categories to five, and others to three, for no proof establishes that any such enumeration is exhaustive. They divided substances (2) into five types: intellect, soul, matter, form, and body.

At times they call the Necessary Existent a substance; this was the view of their ancient thinkers, such as Aristotle and others. At other times they do not call Him that, as in the view of Ibn Sīnā. The early members of this school would conceive intelligible entities in their own minds and then suppose them to exist in external reality. As is related of the adherents of Pythagoras and Plato (3), the former posited abstract numbers in external reality, while the latter posited the Platonic Forms, namely universals separate from individual entities. They also posited matter in abstraction, namely prime matter, and posited duration