īqāʿ
“Bringing about” — in Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa, the servant’s performative part in a voluntary act: not a second created cause alongside God’s, but the relational performance (with intent and choice) under which God ordinarily creates this act rather than its rival.
Arabic īqāʿ, “causing to occur”, from w-q-ʿ, “to fall, occur”.
Īqāʿ, "bringing about," is Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa's name for the servant's performative part in a voluntary act, distinguished from the existent act-result that God creates. Together with qaṣd (intent) and ikhtiyār (choice), it is not a second created efficient cause alongside God's, but the relational performance included in the complete conditions under which God ordinarily creates this voluntary act rather than its rival.
The ontological fight around it concerned the ḥāl — a "state" or "mode" that some later kalām figures posited as a third category between existence and non-existence to house exactly such relational facts. Al-Taftāzānī criticizes the standard proofs for a literal third realm, yet still restates the middle position: divine creation plus servant choice, with God ordinarily creating the act after firm human intent and not without it. The ḥāl is the contested ontology; the middle position is what survives the criticism.
The corpus's residual: the selector survives as a counterfactually nonredundant, school-specific relational specification under the ordinary divine policy — but not as a demonstrated third entity. When motives and capacities are fixed, the account deliberately supplies no further necessitating reason why A is selected rather than B. That is coherent enough to block an internal-contradiction verdict while carrying a serious luck/control and grounding burden.
The mistaken everyday reading is "a second godlet cause inside the act." The school is explicit that God alone creates the act; what the servant contributes is specification, not a rival creation.