Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

I say:
and needs something to which it can be related, and this can
only be matter, and everything that becomes is preceded by
matter.
The summary of this is that everything that becomes is possible before
it becomes, and that possibility needs something for its subsistence,
namely, the substratum which receives that which is possible. For it must
not be believed that the possibility of the recipient is the same as the
possibility of the agent. It is a different thing to say about Zaid, the agent,
that he can do something and to say about the patient that it can have
something done to it. Thus the possibility of the patient is a necessary
condition for the possibility of the agent, for the agent which cannot act is
not possible but impossible. Since it is impossible that the possibility prior
to the thing’s becoming should be absolutely without substratum, or that
the agent should be its substratum or the thing possible-for the thing
possible loses its possibility, when it becomes actual-there only remains
as a vehicle for possibility the recipient of the possible, i.e. matter. Matter,
in so far as it is matter, does not become; for if it did it would need other
matter and we should have an infinite regress. Matter only becomes in so
far as it is combined with form. Everything that comes into being comes
into being from something else, and this must either give rise to an infinite
regress and lead directly to infinite matter which is impossible, even if we
assume an eternal mover, for there is no actual infinite; or the forms must
be interchangeable in the ingenerable and incorruptible substratum,
eternally and in rotation.’ There must, therefore, be an eternal movement
which produces this interchange in the eternally transitory things. And
therefore it is clear that the generation of the one in each pair of generated
beings is the corruption of the other; otherwise a thing could come into
being from nothing, for the meaning of ‘becoming’ is the alteration of a
thing and its change, from what it has potentially, into actuality. It is not
possible that the privation itself should change into the existent, and it is
not the privation of which it is said that it has become. There exists,
therefore, a substratum for the contrary forms, and it is in this substratum
that the forms interchange.
Ghazali says:
103