 Neither option seems palatable to al-Ghazālī, and his innovative proposal is to distinguish between logical connections and causal connections. On al-Ghazālī’s scheme, the logically necessary constitute a much narrower set of connections than those that are causally necessary (Dutton 2001, 24–5; Schmaltz 2008b, 299–301). This setup allows him to claim that when God intervenes to stop a piece of dry cotton from burning, which obviously diverges from the natural course of events, God need not change the cotton fibers into some material that is fire-resistant, nor is he doing something that is logically impossible. Rather, God is bringing about a state of affairs that is perfectly consistent, hence, possible, but one that is an exception, when compared to the normal type of causal connections we come to expect between fire and cotton.