 One striking feature of Arabic and Islamic accounts of causation is the use of the modal terms “necessary” and “possible” to analyze the causal relation. This practice is especially prominent in Avicenna’s discussions of causality, which emphasize his necessitation thesis: “with the existence of its cause, the existence an effect is necessary”. Although Avicenna does not employ this thesis to restrict the scope of causal power to God, his necessitation thesis appears to have played a role in the history of occasionalism insofar as it is a target of al-Ghazālī’s “no necessary connection” argument, which is discussed below (in  §3.2).