  Looking to his Islamic context, it is important always keep in mind that describing God as the source and cause of being (and even describing God as a “creator”) can mean very different things, and so care must be taken not to assume we know what Maimonides is talking about just because his God is a creating source and cause.  Describing God as a cause of being, or as a creator, or even as a creator ex nihilo might mean—as it does in al-Kindi—that He brings about the existence of the world in time (in this way standing in clear opposition to an Aristotelian view of eternity or a Plotinian view of emanation), or it might mean something else entirely: It might mean for instance that God is an eternal ontological source. This idea can be seen in Avicenna for whom God is the Being eternally engaged in an ongoing process of emanation, and in this way eternally generating existence itself. This idea of God-as-source can be seen too in a somewhat different way in Averroes for whom God-as-creator is the eternal-ontological source, the Aristotelian uncaused cause who eternally sustains the universe and—absent an Avicennian process of emanationist intermediation—is the constant productive source—and in this sense, the creator—of cosmic existence (see Leaman 1988, esp. 42-71 and Davidson 1987; see too Taylor 2012a, Other Internet Resources).  Averroes in this regard champions an ab aeterno generation which can in part be characterized as not-quite-a-creation-view, and can in part be characterized as not-quite-an-eternity-view (depending, of course, on what one means by those terms):