nor that He is inside the universe or outside it, nor that He is contiguous with it or separate from it, nor that making a physical, sensory gesture toward Him is impermissible (1).
Rather, it is authentically established in the Ṣaḥīḥ (2) on the authority of Jābir ibn ʿAbd Allāh that when the Prophet ﷺ delivered his monumental sermon on the Day of ʿArafah to the largest gathering ever attended by the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, he kept saying, “Have I conveyed (the message)?” They would answer, “Yes.” He would then raise his finger toward the heaven, turn it toward them (4), and say, “O Allah, bear witness,” repeating this more than once—and narrations of this sort are many.
So if the truth is what these privative theologians—those who strip away and deny the attributes affirmed by the Book and the Sunnah—claim, namely these expressions and the like (5), to the exclusion of what is understood from the Book and Sunnah, whether by explicit wording or by apparent meaning, how could it be conceivable of Allah Exalted, then of His Messenger ﷺ, and then of the best of this community, that they would constantly speak in terms whose explicit wording or apparent sense (6) runs contrary to the truth, while the very truth that must be held in belief is something they never divulge at all—neither explicitly nor implicitly—until the peasants of Persia and Byzantium, the fledglings of the Jews (7) and the philosophers, should appear