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

concedes the existence of an entity which has an eternal past must
concede that there exist acts, too, which have no beginning in the past.
And it by no means follows from the existence of His acts that they must
have entered existence, just as it by no means follows from the past
permanency of His essence that He has ever entered existence. And all
this is perfectly clear, as you see.
Through this First Existent acts can exist which never began and will
never cease, and if this were impossible for the act, it would be
impossible, too, for existence, for every act is connected with its existent in
existence. The theologians, however, regarded it as impossible that God’s
act should be eternal, although they regarded His existence as eternal,
and that is the gravest error. To apply the expression `production’ for the
world’s creation as the Divine Law does is more appropriate than to use it
of temporal production, as the Ash’arites did,’ for the act, in so far as it is
an act, is a product, and eternity is only represented in this act because
this production and the act produced have neither beginning nor end. And
I say that it was therefore difficult for Muslims to call God eternal and the
world eternal, because they understood by `eternal’ that which has no
cause. Still I have seen some of the theologians tending rather to our
opinion.
Ghazali says:
I say:
Their fourth proof is similar to the third, for they say that if
the world were annihilated the possibility of its existence
would remain, as the possible cannot become impossible.
This possibility is a relative attribute and according to them
everything that becomes needs matter which precedes it and
everything that vanishes needs matter from which it can
vanish, but the matter and the elements do not vanish, only
the forms and accidents vanish which were in them.
If it is assumed that the forms succeed each other in one substratum in
a circular way and that the agent of this succession is an eternal one,
nothing impossible follows from this assumption. But if this succession is
assumed to take place in an infinite number of matters or through an
infinite number of specifically different forms, it is impossible, and equally
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