  On the question of being's source, while Maimonides shares with his Islamic predecessors a commitment to God's role as the ultimate cause of the world, he additionally seems to share with al-Farabi and Avicenna, and in opposition to the views of Averroes, the idea that the active intellect is a dator formarum (a giver of forms). On this view, the active intellect actually supplies the world in which we live with its forms and as such, plays a crucial causal role in the very formation of existence. In this sense, the active intellect is allowed to play a shared role in God's creative, sustaining role as source of existence (in whatever way that process is ultimately understood).