the Creator, exalted is He, creates everything other than Himself, and thus has a relation (1) to His creatures. His Essence is inseparable from His attributes, His attributes are inseparable from His Essence, and each of His inseparable attributes is inseparable from every other attribute.

We have explained that the Necessary Existent indicated by contingent beings and the Beginningless One indicated by temporally originated things is the Creator who exists by Himself, who has always existed and will always exist, and whose nonexistence is impossible. Describing the Lord as necessary in Himself and everything other than Him as contingent was not the position of Aristotle and the ancient philosophers. Rather, they called Him a principle and a cause, and affirmed Him on the basis of celestial motion, saying:

“The celestial sphere moves in order to emulate Him.”

Ibn Sīnā and those like him therefore constructed a doctrine combining the position of those philosophers with that of the Muʿtazilites. When the Muʿtazilites said:

“Existents are divided into the beginningless and the temporally originated, and the Beginningless One has no attribute,”

they said:

“Existents are divided into the necessary and the contingent, and the Necessary Existent has no attribute.”

And when the former said:

“There cannot be more than one beginningless being,”

they said:

“There cannot be more than one necessary being.”] (2).

[Commentary on His Statement That Everything Other Than Him Is Temporally Originated]

As for his statement:

“Indeed, [everything] (3) other than Him is temporally originated” (4),

this is true. The pronoun in “other than Him” refers to Allah, and when He is mentioned by an explicit noun—