Eric L. Ormsby

Everything which God apportions to man, such as sustenance, life-span, pleasure and pain, capacity and incapacity, belief and disbelief, obedience and sin, is all of it sheer justice, with no injustice in it; and pure right, with no wrong in it.

Indeed, it is according to the necessarily right order, in accord with what must be and as it must be and in the measure in which it must be; and there is not in possibility anything whatever more excellent, more perfect, and more complete than it. For if there were and He had withheld it, having power to create it but not deigning to do so, this
would be miserliness contrary to the divine generosity and injustice contrary to the divine justice. But if He were not able, it would be incapability contrary to divinity.

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Originally published in Eric Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought: The Dispute Over Al-Ghazali’s Best of All Possible Worlds, Princeton University Press, 1984.