Without Increasing in Them

Article 13. Mā zāla bi-ṣifātihi qadīman qabla khalqihi, lam yazdad bi-kawnihim. Just as He was possessed of His attributes prior to His creation, so He remains with the same attributes without increasing in them as a result of His creation coming into being.

This is a very important point, point number 13. What it means is this: just because His creation came into being, He does not become more of a creator than He already was. He was already fully a creator before He even created.

There is the familiar figure of somebody who brags: I can do this, I can do this, and he has never done anything. Some person in the community says: I can do this, I can do that, and does not do anything. And then one day he goes out, and he actually buys the M6, a BMW. He has been bragging about it from before, but he never got one. Everybody has been saying: he is irrelevant; do not even listen to him. One day he gets it. But with Allah (swt), that was not the case. He always had the ability to do what He wanted. We have come into this kind of little dimension of time, and start to think that, hey, Allah is in time as well. And that is where the problem is.

So he says that Allah does not increase, and, for that matter, does not even decrease. No resource of His diminishes by His creation of the creation. Reiterating that, he says:

Wa kamā kāna bi-ṣifātihi azaliyyan, kadhālika lā yazālu ʿalayhā abadiyyā. As He was before creation qualified with the specific attributes, so He remains forever described by them.

So these attributes will always remain as well, and they will not diminish over time. They will not become prey to weakness, as the human being sometimes does. If He were to develop an attribute afterwards, that would mean He had shortcomings beforehand. And our belief in Allah (swt) is that Allah has always been all-powerful and all-able, all the way from the beginning, meaning from eternity.