(1) The text between square brackets is absent from B, A, N, and M. Alongside the end of this passage, the margin of manuscript ʿ contains the following lengthy comment: “It should be known that a group of Māturīdīs maintain that Allah’s disposal of His dominion is good only when it accords with wisdom; if it departs from what wisdom requires, it is foolishness, from which Allah Most High must be declared transcendent. I believe that those among the people of the Sunnah who affirm causes, means, wise purposes, and benefits do not maintain that His disposal of His dominion is good without qualification. Anyone who maintains that however He disposes of His dominion it is good must necessarily reject causes, means, wise purposes, and benefits. This is the position of al-Ashʿarī and those among the people of the Sunnah who follow him: they affirm sheer divine volition. They consequently define wisdom as that which occurs in accordance with its agent’s intention, and foolishness as that which fails to accord with his intention for some reason. “Those who affirm wise purposes, benefits, causes, and means—such as the Hanafīs, the Muʿtazila, and those who follow their approach—do not define wisdom in this way. Rather, they define it as that which produces a praiseworthy outcome or brings benefit to the agent or to another. Likewise, those who affirm that good and evil are rationally discernible, such as the Māturīdīs and the Muʿtazila, maintain that His disposal of His dominion is good only when it accords with the judgment of reason. They therefore do not consider it rationally possible for the obedient to be punished and the disobedient to be granted bliss; nor do they consider it rationally possible for polytheism and unbelief to be pardoned. “According to those who maintain that Allah determines what is good and evil, however, were He to deem good what He had deemed evil and deem evil what He had deemed good, He would be entitled to do so. This is the position of al-Ashʿarī and his peers among Ahl al-Sunna wa-l-Jamāʿa, and all of this concerns rational possibility. “Shams al-Aʾimma al-Sarakhsī and Fakhr al-Islām al-Bazdawī, despite being among the leading Hanafīs, did not adopt the Māturīdī position on rational good and evil; rather, they adopted al-Ashʿarī’s position on the matter. Sadr al-Sharīʿa stated that al-Ashʿarī permits a servant to be held accountable for what is neither the servant’s own act, its effect, nor something he brought into being. His point was that they do not permit this, but regard it as impossible. In their view, the servant’s act therefore proceeds neither from Allah alone nor from the servant alone, but from Allah and the servant together, so that reward and punishment may validly follow. “Imām al-Haramayn—despite being a Shāfiʿī—adopted a still more extreme position. In *al-Nizāmiyya*, he stated that the servant’s act proceeds from the servant alone. To establish this, he levelled forceful and damaging objections against al-Ashʿarī’s position and portrayed it as reprehensible. Yet in *al-Irshād* he had presented a position like that of al-Ashʿarī and claimed that it was a belief he professed as a matter of religion before Allah Most High. This is astonishing on the part of the Imām. “The author of *al-Maqāsid* denied that this was Imām al-Haramayn’s position because he was misled by the latter’s statement in *al-Irshād* and, for some reason (?), had not seen the Imām’s treatise entitled *al-Nizāmiyya*. The Imām’s student explicitly stated in his commentary on *al-Irshād* that this was Imām al-Haramayn’s final position; he sought to support it and to discredit the position expressed in *al-Irshād*. Imām al-Rāzī likewise related this position from Imām al-Haramayn, as did al-Shahrastānī in *al-Milal*.”