 Though the term “occasional cause” has been suggested as originating with the French philosopher Louis de la Forge (Carraud 2002, 347), the first philosophers to explicitly expound the position were the Islamic occasionalists. Our brief discussion here will not be able to do justice to its complex and rich development, but Islamic occasionalism seems to have emerged when the theologians of the Ash‘arite school of kalām (Islamic doctrinal theology) began to consider the implications of the systematic reinterpretation, development, and integration of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism that occurred within the Islamic intellectual world in the tenth and eleventh centuries (cf. Adamson, P. &amp; Taylor, R.C. 2005, 4–6). Among these Islamic occasionalists, al-Ash‘ari (873–935), the founder of Ash‘arite school, appears to have been particularly influential (Griffel 2007).