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

deeds?’ May God make us perspicacious and lift from us the veils of
ignorance; indeed He is the bounteous, the generous! To contemplate the
various actions of the heavenly bodies is like contemplating the kingdom
of heaven, which Abraham contemplated, according to the words of the
Qur’an: ‘Thus did we show Abraham the kingdom of heaven and of the
earth, that he should be of those who are sure.’ And let us now relate
Ghazali’s argument about the movements.
Ghazali says:
The second point in this argument concerns the special
direction of the movement of the spheres which move
partially from east to west, partially in the opposite direction,
whereas the equivalence of the directions in relation to their
cause is exactly the same as the equivalence of the times. If
it is said: If the universe revolved in only one direction, there
would never be a difference in the configuration of the stars,
and such relations of the stars as their being in trine, in
sextile, and in conjunction would, never arise, but the
universe would remain in one unique position without any
change; the difference of these relations, however, is the
principle of all production in the world-we answer: Our
argument does not concern the difference in direction of
movement; no, we concede that the highest sphere moves
from east to west and the spheres beneath it in the opposite
direction, but everything that happens in this way would
happen equally if the reverse took place, i.e. if the highest
sphere moved from west to east and the lower spheres in
the opposite direction. For all the same differences in
configuration would arise just as well. Granted that these
movements are circular and in opposite directions, both
directions are equivalent; why then is the one distinguished
from the other, which is similar to it?’ If it is said: as the two
directions are opposed and contrary, how can they be
similar?-we answer: this is like saying ‘since before and after
are opposed in the existing world, how could it be claimed
that they are equivalent?’ Still, it is asserted by you
philosophers that the equivalence of times, so far as the
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