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Does Ibn Taymiyyah hold that creating something from nothing is not within the realm of power and possibility, and that Allah only brought things into existence from something, and do you agree with this statement?

1 min readAlso available in العربية

Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah did not say that creating something from nothing is beyond Allah's power. Rather, he denied witnessing such an event occurring initially without any pre-existing matter, and this is what Allah has informed us about in the Quran: "And Allah has created every [living] creature from water" (Quran 24:45), and "and We made from water every living thing" (Quran 21:30). Ibn Taymiyyah's intention with his words was to refute the theologians and philosophers in their claim of the eternity of matter.

Summarized from the full answer at Ftawy · reviewed Sep 2, 2026

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