takwīn
Al-Māturīdī’s name for God’s eternal attribute of creating. Takwīn itself is eternal, while each thing created (mukawwan) begins in time — the school’s way of saying God was always able to create without the world being eternal.
Arabic takwīn, “bringing into being”, from kāna, “to be”.
Takwīn is al-Māturīdī's name for God's attribute of creating, held to be eternal like the other attributes. Its effect — the mukawwan, the thing brought into being — is always temporal. The distinction lets the school say God was never not a creator in capacity and attribute, while the world still begins.
The work this does is defensive and offensive at once. Defensive: it answers "was God idle before creation?" without making the world co-eternal with God. Offensive: it blocks the inference from "God is eternally creator" to "something created is eternal" — the attribute is eternal, each token of its exercise is not. Harvey and Jalajel read it as a complete divine action model: one eternal attribute, temporal instances.
The residual the corpus tracks: an eternal attribute with temporal tokens still needs an account of why this token at this juncture rather than its rival — which is where the servant's īqāʿ and the selector question come in, and where the school's account is at its thinnest.
The mistaken everyday reading is "God's creating is just another event in time." The whole point of the term is to separate the eternal attribute from its temporal effects.